Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

112 Elizabeth Broadwin
Lucian’s contemporaries. Though much of Lucian’s parody involves the examination
of archaic texts such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Lucian’s intertextual
play must be placed within a distinct culture and society. As the narrative voice
of travelogue, Lucian engages Homer in a dialogue: “I asked him (among other
questions) about his birthplace, mentioning that this was still an unresolved
enigma, hotly debated in our world” (Lucian, 2004: II.20). According to Jones,
“the subject of Homer’s birthplace was not merely a learned controversy, but
involved the prestige of many cities. Aelius Aristides, for example, vaunts the
claims of Smyrna, which are also represented on its coins” (1986: 55). Lucian
pokes fun at the municipal efforts invested in the project of discovering Homer’s
biographical information. Lucian engages one of his oldest literary predecessors
in order to discuss his own society’s preoccupations. The comic aspect of this
episode then is the ease with which Lucian obtains the information which many
men in his own society have sought at considerable cost; Lucian ends the controversy
simply by asking Homer.
After Homer answers that “every last one [of his verses] was original,”
Lucian again alludes to his contemporaries: “that was when I began to condemn
the grammarians in the school of Zenodotus and Aristarchus for purveying nonsense”
(2004: II.20). While he harkens back hundreds of years, “Lucian is not
lost in the past. Epigrammatists of the imperial period still joke about ‘the puppies
of Zonodotus’ and ‘the bookworms of Aristarchos’ tribe.’ The business of
interpolating Homer continued to flourish” (Jones, 1986: 55). Homer serves
Lucian’s narrative strategy and becomes a medium through which Lucian can
compel his readers to think critically about their own society. Lucian satirizes
Greek and Roman societies’ preoccupation with uncovering the past and also
seems to comment on the laborious process of historical research.
Lucian’s narrative, free from the constraints of time and reality, not only
uses Homeric references to allude to contemporary figures, but also has Homeric
figures interact with people from Greek society and history. In Book II, when
the narrator relates a contest held on the Isle of the Blessed, he says, “Carus,
Heracles’ successor, won the wrestling, defeating Odysseus for the crown. The
boxing was a tie. The contestants were Aerius the Egyptian, who is buried in
Corinth, and Epeius” (Lucian, 2004: II.22). According to Jones’ scholarship,
Carus was not a figure from lore but a real athlete who was victorious at the
Olympics in 212 B.C., and Aerius too was most likely “a real person, probably
of the imperial period” (Jones, 1986: 55). Lucian makes use of the epic tradition
of relating contests and even figures made famous in the epic form to add
popular knowledge to his work. The combination of elements known from epic
literature with those known from popular culture and history serves to remind
the reader of different classifications of knowledge and truth.
In his work on historiography, How to Write History, Lucian comments on
his society’s acceptance of Homer’s texts as truth because Homer was removed
from the time period about which he composed his verses: “Homer indeed in
general tended towards the mythical in his account of Achilles, yet some nowa-