Lucian’s Alexander: technoprophecy, thaumatology and the poetics of wonder

This is the final version of the chapter. Available from De Gruyter via the DOI in this record.Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes number 53This paper focuses on Lucian’s critique of the wonder-working of the second century CE prophet of Asclepius, Alexander of Abonouteichos, in Alexander or the False Prophet. It explores meta-literary depths of the essay which have not been scrutinized before. The analysis unfolds in three sections. In the first, Alexander emerges from an intertextual reading with Hippolytus’ polemic against magic (Ref. 4.28-42) as a creative innovator of the common magician’s repertoire, making his magic a cypher for Lucian’s own literary techniques. In the second section, I argue that Alexander’s ‘autophone’ oracles dramatize Lucian’s poetics in a particularly pointed way, embroiling author and subject in a dialogue of mutual exposure. Overlaps emerge between Lucian’s technoprophet and the discourse of Orakelkritik, which sharpen and lend nuance to Lucian’s attack, whilst comparison with Hero of Alexander’s mechanical wonders opens up a more ambivalent interpretation of the professed scepticism of both Lucian and his readers. Having examined the ways in which Lucian implicates himself in Alexander’s fraud, connections are explored with other Lucianic works-of-wonder such as Lover of lies, True Stories and the prolaliai, showing that magic and religious fraud are deeply connected with fiction in Lucian’s oeuvre. This lends uniquely rich complexity to Lucian’s thaumatology, since he meditates not only on the nature of wonders, but on the nature of reading about wonders as well.This article was written whilst I was a Marie Curie research fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, and I gratefully acknowledge both the funding and the resources of AIAS and Aarhus Universit

Mixis

Observateur hors pair, critique acerbe, orateur virtuose qui manie l’humour et l’ironie tout autant qu’il se plaît aux références intertextuelles et aux réflexions métalittéraires, Lucien de Samosate est un des grands noms du iie siècle après J.-C. Son influence sur des oeuvres aussi variées que l’Éloge de la Folie d’Érasme, Pantagruel et Gargantua de Rabelais, les Dialogues des morts de Fontenelle, les Voyages de Gulliver de Swift et les Petites œuvres morales de Leopardi témoigne de l’étendue de ses expérimentations littéraires. C’est à l’une des spécificités de l’écriture lucianesque, la mixis, que le présent ouvrage est consacré. Le mélange des genres à l’oeuvre chez Lucien y est examiné par un ensemble de spécialistes dans ses dimensions théoriques et pratiques. En effet, si Lucien se revendique fièrement comme l’inventeur d’un type particulier de mélange, le dialogue comique, une multiplicité d’autres formes, d’autres « ingrédients » sont convoqués dans ses textes. En s’interrogeant sur la nature de la mixis, sur ses modalités et sur ses fonctions, ainsi que sur ses effets, il s’agit de proposer une synthèse sur un des éléments clés de la poétique lucianesque

Lucian\u27s self-conscious fiction : theory in practice

THESIS 760

The game of the name: onymity and the contract of reading in Lucian.

Lucian's use of various 'masks' or *personae* has been the subject of stimulating debate: some have seen his games as an exploration of his own cultural identity, or more generally, what it means to be Greek; others have interpreted it as Lucian's problematization of authorial identity - a play on anonymity, or a conscious distancing-technique. This article explores another aspect of Lucian's name-games: how Lucian manipulates onymity within the framework of make-believe, pushing the limits of the contract of fictionality between author and reader