Adam N. Bartley, Lucian's Dialogi marini. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. viii, 205 p.
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- ISBN 9781443809603.
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Présentation de l'éditeur:
Lucian, born in approximately 125 AD, was a prolific satiricalauthor from the city of Samosata in the province of Syria, now Samsatin Turkey. He was, apparently, not a native speaker of Greek, and yetwent on to become an instructor in rhetoric, with posts in Greece, Gauland Rome, before finally becoming an administrator in Egypt during thereign of the Emperor Commodus and passing away some time after 180 AD.He composed more than seventy works, including many satiricaldialogues, speeches and even a short novel. The Dialogues of the SeaGods are a collection of brief dialogues between famous figures inGreek myth that all have something to do with the sea, includingPoseidon, Triton, the Nereids, the Winds and even the Cyclops. Whilethey are cleverly written and amusing in their own right, these fifteendialogues also have much to show us about the works of mythology thatwere popular in the second century AD, contemporary views on the manyinconsistencies in Greek myth and those parts of the world where,despite being outside what we would consider ‘Greece' in modern terms,Greek culture flourished under Roman rule.
This volumeconsiders the developments of literary Greek language, the relationshipbetween Greek Drama, Epic and Bucolic poetry in Lucian's time, and thediscussions of myth by philosophical and moralistic writers that Lucianboth uses to critique myths and parodies in their own right. This hasmuch to tell us about the works that survived into Lucian's time fromthe Classical period, including many that we now know only fromfragmentary material, and their relative popularity. There is alsodetailed examination of the way that the interaction between Greek andnon-Greek culture has influenced Lucian's depiction of ‘Greek' myths.
DrAdam Bartley received his PhD in Greek and Latin Literature at theUniversity of Sydney in 2001. He has conducted research theGeorg-August Universität, in Göttingen, Germany and the UniversityCollege in Cork, Ireland. He is currently a Lecturer in the Departmentof Classical and Archaeological Studies at the University of Kent.