Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 8 In Praise of the Fly
- 9 Lucian’s Phalaris
- 10 Lucian the Doorkeeper: Inside and Outside in Lucianic Poetics
- 11 Geographical Authority and Bodily Entanglement in Lucian’s True Histories
- 12 Menippus Goes to the Moon: Fantastical Astronomy and Lucian’s Scientific Imagination
- 13 Lucian and Christianity
- 14 Identification and Distance in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans: Subjects and Their Absences
- 15 ‘Here’s Looking at You … ’: The Dialogues of the Gods and the Erotics of the Visual
- Part III
- References
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
15 - ‘Here’s Looking at You … ’: The Dialogues of the Gods and the Erotics of the Visual
from Part II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 8 In Praise of the Fly
- 9 Lucian’s Phalaris
- 10 Lucian the Doorkeeper: Inside and Outside in Lucianic Poetics
- 11 Geographical Authority and Bodily Entanglement in Lucian’s True Histories
- 12 Menippus Goes to the Moon: Fantastical Astronomy and Lucian’s Scientific Imagination
- 13 Lucian and Christianity
- 14 Identification and Distance in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans: Subjects and Their Absences
- 15 ‘Here’s Looking at You … ’: The Dialogues of the Gods and the Erotics of the Visual
- Part III
- References
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Summary
This chapter looks at Lucian’s intervention on the genre of comic dialogue through a discussion of one of the Dialogues of the Gods. In the dialogue between Aphrodite and Selene, Lucian imagines a sexy conversation between Aphrodite and Selene. The story of Selene and Endymion is well known, but in antiquity is almost always told in the barest of forms. Lucian tries to fill in the gaps by having Selene tell Aphrodite about her affair, but leads the reader towards the moment of revelation of what Selene does with Endymion only to pull shut the curtain at the last moment. Through this narrative, Lucian plays with the tradition of myth, with the reader’s sense of knowledge and knowingness, and with the erotics of the visual – in a way that amusingly makes the reader complicit with the author’s satiric fun.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Lucian , pp. 318 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024