Collected Ancient Greek Novels

"This is a really fun text. It’s in two books, and the narrator, who’s completely unreliable, ends by promising to give us lots more of the story, which he doesn’t. It’s a true story in the sense that it’s a complete lie. The narrator starts off by suggesting he’ll be just like other historians, or just like Odysseus in the Odyssey : “I warn you that I am going to tell you the biggest lies that you have ever heard; and this is the only true statement in the whole book.” He then tells this wonderful sequence of stories about, for instance, going to the moon and encountering the battle of the Moon people and the Sun people. I included it on the list not just because the whole thing is a playful re-write of the wandering books of the Odyssey, but also because in the second book, the narrator goes to the Elysian Fields and encounters both Homer and Odysseus. There’s some wonderful satiric play with the ancient traditions of Homeric scholarship. The narrator cross-examines Homer and asks all about his birth-place, and why he started these poems in the way he did. And Homer has nothing interesting to say whatsoever during this interview. Maybe like me being interviewed. [ Laughs .] Then, he meets Odysseus, who’s very keen to re-write his own story, send a letter back to Calypso, tell her that he really regrets coming to Ithaca, and if only he could come back and be immortal with her, that everything would be so much better. “It can also be fun to be in multiple, different, strange new worlds” I love the playfulness of this text, but I also love what it brings out about the Odyssey itself. It shows how there’s a lightness and playfulness even in the Homeric poem. There’s a sense that you don’t actually quite know what’s going to come next, and some of it is kind of crazy, and fantastical, and unrealistic, and deliberately unrealistic. It’s not all very solemn. It can also be fun to be in multiple, different, strange new worlds. The playful whimsy is very important. The satire is much more biting against the genres that take themselves too seriously, which for Lucian are history and philosophy. In those genres, there’s a much more explicit claim that the author is going to be telling you the exact truth, either about how you should live or what really happened. By contrast, there’s a real gentleness in how Lucian is playing with Homer. Lucian knows that Homer isn’t actually telling you that. Homer is telling you, ‘Here’s this imaginary world which is truthful in a way different than philosophers’ claims to truth-telling.’ Yes. Not that kind of veracity, anyway. Maybe some other kind of truth, but not the ‘this really happened’ kind of truth. I actually do think the Odyssey is extremely truthful in many ways, about feelings and relationships and social structures, and the details of the material world and lived experience. But it’s not making moralizing injunctions or claims to literal historical truth."