Imperial Greek Literature

Lucian’s Icaromenippus opens with Menippus reckoning the distance of his travel to the moon and the citadel of Zeus. The category confusion produced by describing travel to non-terrestrial destinations in terrestrial terms marks the spatial and temporal incongruities between the sublunar and superlunar worlds as a theme that recurs in each stage of Menippus’ narration of his journey.

Despite its popularity from antiquity through the Renaissance, Oppian’s Halieutica has found itself largely neglected by modern classical scholarship, dismissed as a stale, versified assemblage of dry technical learning (Fajen 1999).

Increasing (and well-deserved) attention has been paid to the thematic and structural commonalities of ‘Second Sophistic’ and early Christian literature. This scholarship has often been undertaken with the goal of identifying a broader intellectual and cultural landscape and disrupting traditional disciplinary boundaries that have obscured or effaced the existence thereof.

Dio Chrysostom’s Chryseis: The Limits of Ancient Literary Criticism

Of Philostratus’ works the collection of Letters has garnered relatively little critical attention, at least in part because of their rejection of epistolary conventions. They strain the limits of epistolography, and instead might better be described as prose poems that abandon epistolary pretense altogether; as Rosenmeyer has argued, they are best conceptualized as “sophistic exercise[s] in variatio” (cf. Goldhill). Moreover, the fragmented transmission of the corpus (Stefec) presents hurdles to any cohesive interpretation.

Lucian’s De Dea Syria (henceforward DDS) describes the temple and cult of “the Syrian goddess” in Hierapolis. Its distinctive format, with a narrator who self-identifies as “Assyrian” yet imitates the language and style of Herodotus, has led modern scholars to interpret it as an optimistic model of how disparate cultural identities might be satisfactorily negotiated in the Imperial era (Lightfoot 2003; Andrade 2013).