Lucian and His Roman Voices ─ Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire

Lucian and His Roman Voices examines cultural exchanges, political propaganda, and religious conflicts in the Early Roman Empire through the eyes of Lucian, his contemporary Roman authors, and Christian Apologists. Offering a multi-faceted analysis of the Lucianic corpus, this book explores how Lucian, a Syrian who wrote in Greek and who became a Roman citizen, was affected by the socio-political climate of his time, reacted to it, and how he ‘corresponded’ with the Roman intelligentsia. In the process, this unique volume raises questions such as: What did the title ‘Roman citizen’ mean to native Romans and to others? How were language and literature politicized, and how did they become a means of social propaganda? This study reveals Lucian’s recondite historical and authorial personas, construing his literary activity as a means of depicting the vignettes of second-century reality from the viewpoint of the Romans, the Greeks, the pagans, the Christians, and citizens of the Roman Empire.

Eleni Bozia is a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Florida and Visiting Research Faculty at the Institut fur Informatik at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and several national and international awards, including the Mary A. Sollman Scholarship of the American Academy in Rome and the e-humanities award from the University of Leipzig.