Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

Lucian’s Allusive Journey 113
days are inclined to believe him; they cite as important evidence of his truthfulness
the single fact that he did not write about him during his lifetime: they
cannot find any motive for lying” (Lucian, 1959: 57). Lucian’s integration of
Homeric events rooted in the distant past with more recent history into a completely
false account of a contest warns of the dangers of believing all that is
recounted about the past.
Even though Lucian employs Homeric and epic literary allusion to propel
the narrative journey, the narrative voice Lucian adopts in A True Story is overwhelmingly
allusive to Herodotus’ narrative style. In Herodotus or Aetion,
Lucian says of Herodotus:
I wish it were possible to imitate Herodotus’s other qualities too. I do not
mean all and everyone (this would be too much to pray for) but just one of
them—whether the beauty of his diction, the careful arrangement of his
words, the aptness of his native Ionic, his extraordinary power of thought, or
countless jewels which he has wrought into a unity beyond hope of imitation.
But where you and I and everyone else can imitate him is in what he did with
his composition. (Lucian, 1959: 143)
Lucian’s comment in How to Write History is rendered facetious and ironic
when viewed in conjunction with A True Story, in which Lucian aptly imitates
and satirizes Herodotus’ style and content. Lucian may employ epic allusion to
travel from one place to the next but certainly references Herodotus in the ethnographic
elements of his travel narrative. Lucian alludes to Herodotus’
description of Indian society in his description of ampelomixia, which Sidwell
describes as a word invented by Lucian and translates as “sexual intercourse
with vines” (in Lucian, 2004: 434). He also alludes to Homer in describing the
sexual practices on the Isle of the Blessed: “as for love-making, their ideas are
as follows. They copulate openly, with everyone looking on, both women and
men, without feeling the least bit ashamed of it” (Lucian, 2004: II.19).
Herodotus records, “All the Indian tribes I have mentioned copulate in the open
like cattle . . . their semen is not white like other peoples” (Herodotus, 1954:
3.101). Some of the vine-women, exotic barbarians that they are, speak Indian
while those on the Isle of the Blessed, although predominantly Greek, adopt the
sexual practices Herodotus reserves for barbarians. Lucian satirizes the
predilection of ethnographic accounts to focus on the sexual mores of foreign
and barbarian peoples as well as on the exoticism of India. After weathering the
epic storm in Book I, Lucian comes across a bronze plaque:
A plaque made of bronze, with an inscription in Greek letters, though faint
and worn, which said, ‘This was the furthest point Heracles and Dionysus
reached.’ There were also two footprints on the nearby rocks, one about a
hundred feet long, and the other smaller. It is my view that the smaller
belonged to Dionysus and the other to Heracles. (Lucian, 2004: I.7)