Lucian

This chapter examines Lucian’s biographical experiments. The second-century ad satirist and belletrist Lucian is not primarily associated with biography as a genre, but he has nonetheless left two substantial satirical pamphlets which include many biographical claims about their victims, the religious activists Peregrinus of Parium and Alexander of Abonotichus. He has also produced a collection of satirical quips which he attributes to his own teacher Demonax, as the central section of an appreciation of his master. There has been long-running debate among scholars on the balance of literary versus historical presences across the whole spectrum of Lucian’s own work, and the biographical pieces are part of that debate. There has been a tendency for literary scholars to doubt the historicity of many details, and for prosopographers and epigraphers to emphasize the proportion of details that can be confirmed by standard historical and archaeological tools. The biographical pieces in some of their details can be used to support both sides: they often contain elements of invention, sometimes admitted by the mischievous narrator Lucian as he goes along; but at the same time, they can support a sense of authenticity in the background of the eastern Roman Empire in which Lucian’s villainous enemies can be seen to flourish.