A question that has haunted my nightmares for the last several weeks is whether or not there could ever be a speaker/writer like Lucian of Samosata today. Lucian is a fantastic writer; his Greek is wonderful and I find him extremely funny which is something that I cannot say of many ancient comedy writers. He was a person who was very aware of his audience and who he was trying to appeal to. He also often writes speeches that appear to be trying to say absolutely nothing in particular, and are meant more to show off his mastery of Greek then anything else. He knew how to pull from the cannon of attic literature and make references to writers from the past in new and inventive ways. With all of this in mind, is it possible for there to ever be a Lucian 2.0?
The first thing to consider would be the canon that Lucian was pulling from which included all types of texts both fiction and non-fiction (Herodotus is definitely a gray area here), and they were stories that nearly everyone (Greek or Roman) would have been familiar with. Especially Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which were especially famous and were written in Lucian’s preferred 5th century Athenian attic Greek. There are literary canons all over the world today, and many famous works that could be referenced but they are all very regional. Usually one famous book in one country is not famous in the same way in another. The only author off the top of my head I can think of who would be comparable to Homer is Shakespeare but that really just shows the canon that I grew up with.
The next part to address would be the dialect that Lucian was writing in, which was not the dominant language of the time or the dominant dialect of Greek. He was speaking and writing in an outdated dialect. Again, Shakespeare is a good example as it is written in early modern English and sounds antiquated to our ears today but is still recognizable. But as English has become a kind of lingua franca of today it would not serve as a very good replacement for the attic Greek dialect that Lucian was using. The attic dialect was meant to call back to what many Greeks appeared to believe was better then the current roman leadership. And Lucian’s few mentions of Latin writers reflect this as well, he and his colleagues who used this dialect often ignored the roman writings altogether.
The next item to talk about is how Lucian’s writings were presented, they were likely meant to be preformed and they were meant to be funny. Speeches are not as common today as they were way back when, especially not funny speeches. The only two jobs even slightly similar to funny rhetorician would be motivational public speaker, and stand up comedian Neither one sounds great, but the second feels closer to what Lucian was.
So if Lucian was going to exist today he would likely to be a stand-up comedian who spoke in early modern English and referenced Shakespeare plays to get his point across. In short there will likely never be another Lucian (though I wish someone would try).
