Life of Lucian

Greek Learning Greek
1

I have been dipping into the Teubner Luciani Opera scans on Hathi, looking for easy reads to distract me from Aristotle. The first section of the first volume was Περὶ τοῦ ἐνυπνίου, ἤτοι βίος Λουκιανοῦ. The title made me expect something like the life of Demosthenes, but it is not a boring biography at all, as it turns out. (Though the one of Demosthenes in the OCTs is not actually bad or boring.)

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015028371709&view=1up&seq=25

Βίος Λουκιανοῦ only seems like first-person biography at the beginning, with the first-person author having dropped out of school, and his father ἐσκοπεῖτο μετὰ τῶν φίλων, ὅ τι καὶ διδάξαιτό με. The choice is made, παρῆν γὰρ ὁ πρὸς μητρὸς θεῖος, ἄριοστος ἑρμογλύφος εἶναι δοκῶν. The author is well-recommended for the task given that in school, ὁπότε γὰρ ἀφεθείην ὑπὸ τῶν διδασκάλων, ἀπoξέων ἂν τὸν κηρὸν ἢ βόας ἢ ἵππους ἢ καὶ νὴ Δί᾽ ἀνθρώπους ἀνέπλαττον, drawing beatings from his teacher, but making him a natural, of course, for art. A very old saw.

But having come to grief on the first day of apprenticeship, the author is visited by an ἐνύπνιον of δύο γυναῖκες λαβόμεναι ταῖν χεροῖν εἷλκόν με πρὸς ἑαυτὴν ἑκατέρα μάλα βιαίως καὶ καρτερῶς. One is ἐργατικὴ καὶ ἀνδρικὴ καὶ αὐχμηρὰ τὴν κόμην, τὼ χεῖρε τύλων ἀνάπλεως. The other is μάλα εὐπρόσωπος καὶ τὸ σχῆμα εὐπρεπὴς καὶ κόσμιος [gender?] τὴν ἀναβολήν. Rather than Virtue and Vice, these are Ἑρμογλυφικὴ Tέχνη and Παιδεία. It made for a somewhat comedic take on the choice of Hercules.

The conclusion to the choice, and the “go to college and become famous, kids!” moral was a bit stale, I have to say. I’m surprised to hear it from Lucian, but I haven’t read nearly enough of him.

The story was is very accessible as far as language goes. The one important vocabulary word that I had real trouble with, as I was still trying to figure out what was going on, was ἑρμογλύφος. I should have recognized “glyph”, but λιθοξόος a bit later on made it clear.

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Yes, Lucian is very accessible and writes very straightforward prose, Atticising but with a bit of a Koine underlay. I did my M.A. thesis on the De Morte Perigrini, and I often recommend (and have used) Verae Historiae as an intermediate text. An entertaining narrative goes a long way! The title of the text “Concerning the dream…” Should have let you know that it wasn’t the usual Vita (as if anything Lucian writes is ever quite usual). It’s in fact about how he got into writing…

3

Lucian the author should not be confused with the first-person speakers he uses (even, or perhaps especially, in an apparently autobiographical narrative) and the first-person speakers themselves are not always as straightforward as they seem. Baumbach and von Moellendorff 2017, Ein literarischer Prometheus. Lukian aus Samosata und die Zweite Sophistik, are particularly good on Lucian’s shiftiness and penchant for authorial masks.

4

Yes, agree totally. A lot of tongue-in-cheek going on with Lucian. Part of what makes him fun.