This chapter examines the elusive notion of humour in Greek epic. According to Aristotle (Poetics 1448b24) it was Homer who, along with founding most other genres of literature, established ‘the schema of comedy’. Hosty begins by surveying our limited evidence for Homeric humour – both within the Iliad and Odyssey and in mysterious works like the Margites – and proceeds to examine the relationship between Greek epic and the humorous, analysing the potentially whimsical elements of the Epic Cycle, the wry domestic detail of Callimachus’ Hecale, the determinedly straight-faced pastiche of the Batrachomyomachia, and the gleeful absurdity of Lucian’s ‘prose epic’ the True Histories.

The chapter provides a reconsideration of a section in Martianus Capella’s Book 1, dedicated to the ‘failure of the oracles’ and culminating in a quotation of a prophylactic Apollinean oracle, attributed to Alexander of Abonouteichos. The author tries to reconstruct some possible lines of transmission of this oracle, at the same time highlighting how its allegorical framework helps to shed light on some aspects of the ongoing controversy between pagans and Christians, which took into account the thaumaturgical and therapeutic capabilities of the gods.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

Twenty-four declamations from the Greek imperial period, the work of six authors, survive today: a survey reveals that their authors were prominent in politics and culture on a local and often imperial level. Why did these elite men pour such energy into the classical role-play that was declamation? Further indices of the genre's importance are considered: the centrality of declamation to education in this period, the great outpouring of rhetorical theory, the sheer number of declaimers and declamations that we know of, and the distances that star performers travelled and the fees that they earned. Such an enquiry is urgent: declamation was very influential on other genres, and work here has fallen behind work elsewhere. But the most urgent reason is that the question of the relationship of classical past and imperial present is fundamental for all literature in this period, and indeed for this period’s wider culture. This book rejects traditional explanations of the genre in terms of nostalgia, and instead takes seriously the almost universal ancient belief that the past was useful for the present.

This chapter argues that Lucian’s dialogue Timon is best understood as responding to and critiquing polis politics in the Imperial period. Through a number of thinly veiled references to contemporary honorific culture, and in particular to the controversial super-benefactor Herodes Atticus, Lucian makes clear that the target of his satire is not Roman rule itself, but rather the behaviour of the citizens within the Greek cities who were the greatest winners from Roman rule. These individuals had become wealthy and influential through participating in Roman hegemony and now felt that the duties and obligations which membership of a polis imposed on its citizens no longer applied to them, thus threatening the very fabric of polis life. This breaking of the social contract was an abiding concern for polis society, and indeed Lucian makes extensive intertextual use of Classical works addressing precisely this question. The Timon thus not only illustrates the continuing vitality of polis politics in the Imperial period, but also the extent to which the political values which poleis continued to foster were themselves a central part of Greek cultural identity in the Imperial period.

Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.

Lucian’s satires on Peregrinus of Parium and Alexander of Abonoteichos illustrate the growing importance of religion in contests over cultural authority in the second century CE. Prophecy in particular plays a central role in the establishment of Peregrinus’s and Alexander’s authority, and in the satirist’s reframing of these men as charlatans. In fabricating his own prophecies, and thus competing with these would-be holy men at their own game (however satirically), Lucian threatens to reveal himself as just another fame-seeker within the agonistic display culture of the high Roman empire.

The celebrated scholar and literatus Maximos Planoudes (ca. 1255–ca. 1305) was a leading exponent of the study of ancient literature in the late Byzantine world. While best known for this engagement – embodied in his collection of epigrams, the Planoudean Anthology, in his critical editions of, and scholia for, classical texts and in his translations of Latin literature – he also composed an undeservedly little-known poem in the tradition of the ancient Greek idyll. A humorous piece, drawing on numerous ancient sources, particularly on bucolic poetry in the tradition of Theocritus and on Lucian’s satires, it exhibits a refreshing jocularity not usually evident in his other literary activities. This chapter offers a close reading of the Idyll, highlighting its themes of love and homoeroticism, the alterity of otherworlds, and magic and the marvellous. It investigates its connections to other literary traditions and to Planoudes’ scholarship as a whole, and considers the reception of the poem in Byzantium. In composing an idyll – unprecedented in Byzantine poetry – Planoudes creates a parody of ancient texts and authors that is both entertaining and instructive, while being unique in its setting and context.

In Chapter 5, Lucian (c. second century CE) presents a complicated model of difference that relies unevenly on skin color, attire, and language as determinants of identity. His trio of Scythian satires features characters who rework the relationships between race and identity within their specific contexts. The categories of “Greek” and “foreigner” become muddled as Greeks and Scythians share their impressions about black people in their midst: Greeks conflate blackness with Aithiopians or liken it to their own appearance with ease, while one Scythian man marvels at the sight of black Athenian athletes. These varied observations lead to a collective questioning of blackness in relation to Greek identity under the guise of humor.

Chapter 7 moves on to Lucian, who extends the field of reflection by conjuring up the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion, not exclusively but chiefly in texts devoted to philosophy and its pretensions. Philopseudes uses the allure of superstitious tales circulated by philosophers to contemplate the effect of immersive narrative at large; Nigrinus calls upon the aesthetics of deception to expose the shortcomings of protreptic discourse and facile ideas of conversion; Hermotimus compares philosophical misguidance to the effects of visual art and poetry. However, Lucian’s engagement with the aesthetics of deception is not confined to ridiculing philosophy; it is carried by a serious concern with the effects of logos as diagnosed by Plato. The high reflexivity that the form of dialogue and the layering of narrative levels generate in the discussed texts can be seen as a response to the danger inherent in immersion.

The Conclusion draws connections between the Archaic and Classical discourse outlined in this book and the representation of dance, especially pantomime, in the Roman Imperial period. It focuses on a set of key passages in Lucian’s treatise On the Dance, suggesting that by reading dance with Lucian, we can further refine our perspective on the complex interplay between literature, culture, and the potential of the dancing body. I choose to conclude with Lucian in part because his character Lycinus offers an illuminating model for the creative, subversive, and provocative reading of dance. I show that Lycinus uses familiar forms in new ways and rescripts stories about dance encoded within earlier literature, yet in doing so, he also continues a tradition of using the description of solo dance to foreground generic exploration and experimentation – of bringing the unruly body into contact with the workings of a literary text. Reading dance with Lucian and Lycinus thus reveals how the collision of dance and literature bears fruit across diverse creative and cultural contexts.

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal shared across languages and cultures in the second century: the ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech, and who draws attention to his words quawords. Articulate and educated speech becomes a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups in this period. By contrast, orators and authors in both Latin and Greek condemn their opponents as producing mere noise. The ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.