This collection of essays aims to offer a frame of reference on the mixture of genres and styles that characterises the works of Lucian of Samosata, putting together the revised versions of a considerable number of talks given at a conference at Sorbonne University and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2015 (p. 10). Despite the increase in scholarship on Lucian during the last decades, this volume is the first to address comprehensively the author's programmatic mixis from the perspective of an international group of scholars, thereby representing various academic approaches to this versatile author.
The volume consists of four thematic sections, headed by two chapters by way of introduction. The sections respectively address the theorisation of Lucian's mixis (also in metaliterary terms); a general analysis of its practice; its application to five genres (autobiography, novel, comedy, juridical oratory and philosophical account); and its contextualisation inside the imperial ‘société du spectacle’ (p. 257).
The works examined are the most prominent among the latest studies on Lucian's corpus (Bis Accusatus, De Saltatione, Dialogi Mortuorum, Eunuchus, Icaromenippus, Jupiter Confutatus, Jupiter Tragoedus, Necyomantia, Philopseudes, Piscator, Prometheus es in verbis, Verae Historiae). The only noticeable exception is the analysis of the two Phalaris by the editor M. As a consequence, the preliminary commitment to the study not only of Lucian's most renowned works, but also of his ‘textes moins attendus’ (p. 30) is not followed through. Moreover, the essays frequently give the impression of a lack of interplay as if they were thought to stand alone. This could have been mitigated by making effective connections to the exhaustive introductory list by M. of Lucian's passages about mixis (pp. 24–30) and to B.’s sharp preliminary theoretical illustration (pp. 37–41). Analogously, associating the judges in Eun. 12 with ‘une chœur déchaîné de comédie’ (p. 133), M. Glénisson's essay could have been enriched by alluding to A.-M. Favreau-Linder's study on the presence of choruses in Lucian. Similarly, by alluding to pantomime (p. 262), D. Béguin's concluding chapter could have been improved by making some reference to the essay by F. Mestre, which deals extensively with pantomime performance. In the same paper, moreover, reference to M. Diarra's analysis of the autobiographical aspects in Lucian's works could have enhanced Béguin's focus on the importance of literary elaboration for the autobiographical theme.
The bibliography appears strikingly selective. Among the increasing number of studies devoted to Lucian in the past few decades, only the works of the most prominent scholars are cited (a considerable number of these works are penned either by the authors of the book or other speakers at the conference).
The editors’ introductory chapters, ‘Lucien de Samosate et son œuvre’ and ‘L'art de la mixis’, respectively deal with the problems of Lucian's identity and originality as well as with the programmatic definition of mixis as the product of a pepaideumenos and its problematic relationship with the tradition. In B.’s introductory words, however, Lucian's works are unproblematically read as a source of autobiographical information (pp. 14–15), an inclination that is hardly avoided in the first section of Diarra's essay (pp. 149–61) and that is further picked up in the first lines of Béguin's paper (p. 257). Moreover, a contextualisation of Lucian's production within the imperial and the Second Sophistic literature is barely introduced, much to the advantage of the author's ‘traits singuliers’ (p. 15) and the disadvantage of contemporary culture, reductively stigmatised as dominated by the tradition to the detriment of any kind of ‘innovation culturelle majeure’ (p. 16).
Among the essays in Part 1 (opened by B.’s precise ‘Le mélange des genres dans A celui qui a dit: “Tu es un Prométhée dans tes discours”’), K. ní Mheallaigh's ‘Lucien et l'astropoétique’ develops an innovative and convincing metaliterary analysis of Menippus’ voyage to the Moon in Icaromenippus. According to ní Mheallaigh's examination of Lucian's treatment of the Platonic, Menippean and comic models in the dialogue, the voyage is not only a product, but also an effective exemplification of mixis, just like the Moon, as ‘troisième espace’ (p. 68), is a concretisation of hybridity, creativity and satire.
‘Un hippocentaure paralucianesque’ (p. 71) is M. Briand's succeeding paper, ‘La transgénéricité des Histoires vraies’. Contextualising Lucian's mixis in contemporary culture, Briand ingeniously reads True Histories as an extremely complex example of transgeneric and transmedial ‘postmodernist’ romance as is illustrated by his analysis of ekphraseis in VH 1.17–18 and 2.5–6.
Part 2 is ushered in by H.-G. Nesselrath's ‘Faire parler les Enfers’, an investigation of the practice of mixis in Lucian's Dialogi Mortuorum. Rightly, the essay lists the comic and philosophical models of the work, confuting the traditional assumption of its dependence on Menippus or the Descent into Hades. Nesselrath convincingly ascribes to the models the peculiarities of Dialogues of the Dead with respect to Menippus and Icaromenippus, which similarly stage the eponymous hero as the main character. However, suggesting that the conspicuous absence of talks in Menippus and Icaromenippus may directly depend on the Menippean model might appear as an exceedingly firm position. We do not own the Menippean originals, and since B. McCarthy's 1934 article (YCS 4, 3–55), Helm's theories of Lucian's debt to Menippus have been strikingly scaled down.
Convincing and well organised are M.’s ‘Le deux Phalaris de Lucien’ and Glénisson's ‘Quel genre lui donner?’. Nonetheless, M.’s study – an innovative intertextual reading of both Phalaris as interrelated examples of mixis that fall under both the rhetorical declamation and the paradoxical encomium – could have been improved by some contextualising references to Lucian's other paradoxical encomia, De Parasito and Muscae encomium. Glénisson's tentative conclusion of interpreting Bagoas as ‘une figure du mélange des genres constitutif du dialogue de Lucien’ (p. 135) is extremely risky since it does not give sufficient consideration to the character's status as an object of satire (albeit this status clearly emerges from her analysis of Eunuchus as a crescendo of laughter determined by the succession of epic, rhetorical and comic motifs).
The final paper of Part 2, A. Camerotto's ‘Le héros satirique et les effets de la mixis chez Lucien de Samosate’, briefly, but efficaciously, summarises Camerotto's original and well-known theories of the satirical hero – notably Menippus in Icaromenippus and Necyomantia – as an incarnation of mixis.
The five contributions in Part 3 explore the principles of Lucian's mixis in five specific genres. Bios and ‘autobiography’ are investigated in Diarra's ‘La mise en scène de soi chez Lucien’, which shows Lucian tentatively finding his way to the autobiography, starting from the conventions of bios. However, occasionally Diarra does not adequately consider the pitfalls of interpreting Lucian. For instance, she initially justifies the possibility of recognising an autobiographical dimension in Nigrinus because of a presumed homonymy between Λουκιανός (the author of the letter that introduces the dialogue) and the so-called Convert (p. 151). In the work, the homonymy is never made explicit.
From ‘autobiography’ to novel, E. Bowie's ‘Generic Play in Lucian's Philopseudes’ is a convincing attempt to further the contextualisation of The Lover of Lies within the contemporary interest in ‘narrative rich in ἄπιστα’ (p. 172). Specifically, Bowie innovatively, albeit cautiously, relates the dialogue to Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca and Antonius Diogenes’ τὰ ὑπὲρ Θούλην ἄπιστα, two works that are also alluded to in Lucian's Verae Historiae. A conclusive gaze at the similarities and, in particular, the differences with Plato's Symposium suggests to Bowie the possibility that in Philopseudes ‘reflection on ἄπιστα may involve not only reflection on the novelistic form … but also on the differences of that sub-genre from the more frequently adopted form of prose fiction, smaller in scale, that had eros as its mainspring’ (p. 181).
The influence of dramatic choruses on Lucian's dramaturgy in Piscator, Bis accusatus, Jupiter Tragoedus and Cataplus is investigated by Favreau-Linder's ‘Effets de chœur dans la dramaturgie comique de Lucien’. The analysis derives authority from Lucian's statements in Bis acc. 33 about his borrowings from Old Comedy, and rightly continues a tradition of studies that has evidenced the presence of a so-called chorus in dialogues such as, notably, Piscator. In Lucian, however, not all the groups of characters should be related to a chorus. Like several other scholars, J. Bompaire has shown in Lucien écrivain. Imitation et création (1958, pp. 322–3) that some of these groups can be more profitably related to parades of impostors which, in Old Comedy and after the parabasis, followed the hero's victory. Consequently, the philosophers in Pisc. 42ff. do not quite appear as ‘une forme de chœur désuni, divisé en autant de “sous-chœurs” rivaux’ (p. 190), and they can be more profitably related to the comic final parades of impostors. The second part of the paper deals cautiously with how the dialogues with ‘choruses’ were performed and with spoudaiogeloion as their main aim.
The section culminates with I. Gassino's thorough and convincing examination of the mechanisms of satire, mixis and logos dikanikos in Bis Accusatus and Piscator, and with P. Bosman's scrutiny of the imaginary worlds in Jupiter Tragoedus and Jupiter Confutatus. After addressing critically scholars’ inattention to ‘the detail of content and composition and the tight relationship between them’ (p. 227) in both works, Bosman illustrates the targets of Lucian's satire in their interrelated fictional worlds. Both the Epicurean realm in Jupiter Tragoedus and the Cynic one in Jupiter Confutatus are thus presented as the result of a process of satirical simplification, alteration and manipulation of well-known literary and philosophical materials.
The volume is concluded, by way of an epilogue, by Mestre's ‘Dialogue, discours, récit, danse’ and Béguin's ‘Les dialogues de Lucien et la société du spectacle’. Both essays point to the dimension of performance that – not surprisingly for a Sophist such as Lucian – has coherently emerged from several previous papers. In particular, Mestre devotes her study to a previously unnoticed parallel between the dance and Lucian's dialogues. Contextualising the praise of the effeminate pantomime in De Saltatione inside the mixis of the genres that characterise the author's works, she convincingly justifies this apparently inexplicable encomium, showing that pantomime, much like Lucian's dialogues, is a new expression of paideia.
Finally, Béguin focuses on the contextualisation of Lucian's satire in the contemporary ‘société du spectacle’ (p. 257), summarising some of the numerous intertwined themes that emerge in the volume, but neglecting any reference to the ample bibliography about the theatrical motif in Lucian (cf. e.g. M. Jufresa, Itaca 19 [2003], 171–86).
The volume, as a comprehensive and multifocal study on Lucian's programmatic mixis, is an interesting and generally original point of departure for any future study on Lucian's hybridity.
