Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference

Lucian’s writings raise questions about the nature of reading and viewing the lives of others; this book explores these questions through close readings of Lucian’s dialogues and stories.

Lucian scholarship over the past decades has been dominated by terms like performance and personas, so this book asks simply: what happens when we are not performing? When we read or sit in the audience, we cannot perform for the world we are viewing. Nor can we act on our desires and beliefs, since we have no self in that viewed world to move around like an avatar. Is there anything left of us at such moments? As a satirist, Lucian explored these questions not through philosophical arguments but stories – a traveler who looks down on earth from the moon, a philosopher who retires to a contemplative life “as if high up in a theater”, a narrator who demands that a reader not believe anything he writes, and many more. Over the course of seven chapters, this book explores these questions of reading, performing, and the difference via detailed analyses of some of Lucian’s best-known works: Hermotimus, Charon, Icaromenippus, Nigrinus, Rooster, True Stories, and others.

Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Greek literature, Classics and the Humanities, particularly those interested in questions about Lucian and literary interpretation.

Stephen E. Kidd is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University (U.S.A), where he specializes in ancient Greek literature of the classical and imperial periods. He is the author of Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (2014) and Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2019).