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  • 15 - ‘Here’s Looking at You … ’: The Dialogues of the Gods and the Erotics of the Visual

  • from Part II
    • By
  • Edited by Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Lucian
    Published online:
    07 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024, pp 318-330

  • 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.