루키아노스의 철학풍자 연구

Abstract

Lucian of Samosata was a sophist who wrote satirical texts for declamation in the second century A.D. He left as many as eighty pieces of work under his name, but somehow he failed to secure proper recognition from his contemporaries. Of the few fragmentary references to him the most notable is the article in the Byzantine Suda which regards Lucian as a despicable atheist and is largely responsible for the longsustained prejudice against him. At the end of the nineteenth century the German scholars were still attacking Lucian as a plagiarist and/or epigone of Menippus. Since the 1930s, however, British and American scholars have been engaged in assessing the nature of his work in the firm belief that Lucian has his own distinctive literary value. Chapter 1 is an outline of the reception history of Lucian's works. Here I tried to define the aim of the dissertation as a critical reading of Lucian's philosophic satires on the assumption that it owes by and large to his Syrian background and rhetoric education. Among the works intensively discussed here are the following philosophic satires: Nekyomanteia, Hermotimus, Symposium, Nigrinus, Demonax, Alexander and De Morte Peregrini. In Chapter 2 I discuss the originality of Lucian's satires and try to figure out the textual characteristic common to these seven works. I also raise the question: why and how Lucian creates a literary persona of his own. In Chapter 3 my discussion focuses on the three comic dialogues: Nekyomanteia, Hermotimus and Symposium. In these works Lucian pits the theme of the valuable layman's life against the falseness of 'pseudo-philosophers'. In Chapter 4 the lives of the three philosophers in Nigrinus, Demonax and Alexander are discussed. As each life is presented in its own peculiar way as the paragon of philosophy, I try to deduce whatever criteria of philosophic satire may have been entertained by Lucian. In Chapter 5 De Morte Peregrini, one of Lucian's most controversial satires, is discussed on the assumption that the author is not a mere satirist but a sincere critic who relentlessly makes a fool of the notorious would-be philosopher. My conclusion in Chapter 6 is that the value of Lucian's texts should not be judged merely by its creative aspects, because they prove the validity of the author's life-long effort to reconcile his Syrian background with the Greco-Roman world and thereby establish his own self-identity as a Roman citizen born in Syria but immersed in Greek culture.