Nearing the end of Book I of the True Histories, Lucian and his men stumble upon Lychnopolis, the City of Lamps, in which animated household lamps congregate in an orderly society. In the article Lucian’s Lynchnopolis and the Problems of Slave Surveillance, Sonia Sabnis argues that the lamps of Lynchopolis symbolize household slaves. Further, she reasons that their society builds on a long tradition of animated and personified lamps in Greek literature in order to expose and confirm the hazards and uncertainties regarding the presence, knowledge, and rational thinking of slaves. The city’s organization invalidates a common thread within slaveholder ideology: the belief that slaves lacked the rational capability to govern their own lives. When Professor Farmer introduced Sabnis’ interpretation of Lynchopolis, I was intrigued and sought to learn more about the connection between lamps and enslavement in the Classical canon. I read the entirety of Sabnis’s article and intend to present her most compelling assertions for my final erga.
Sabnis organizes her essay into three parts: Lamps and Slaves, Aristophanes to Wodehouse, and Lychnomancy. The first section unpacks Lychnopolis within the context of Lucian’s True History with a specific focus on lamps as a symbol of the enslaved. The latter two sections connect lamps with other pieces of literature. These two portions use epigrams and Greek comedy to showcase how other authors comment on slaves. Interestingly, the lamp is popular literary motif across time.
By drawing a connection between lamps and slaves, Sabnis can assess the general beliefs and ideas about the enslaved. She begins by conducting a close analysis of the Lychnopolis episode in True Histories where Lucian and his men encounter a society of their domestic helpers. Sabnis comments on the travelers’ first expression of fear despite previous dangerous entanglements. Their fear is misunderstood when understood on its own; however, by applying the theory that the lamps symbolize “slaves who find a refuge from their masters worlds”, we can better understand the voyagers’ fear. This is supported by the lamps’ human-like voices and human-like institutions. We can attribute the men’s fear to the existence of subjects outside of a master enslaved system. In Lychnopolis the traditional social hierarchy of the ancient world is upended, particularly the master-slave dynamic. Instead, the two social groups are on equal footing, rather, in Lychnopolis, Lucian and his men are at the mercy of their lamps. This scene depicts a frightening fantasy and a power reversal a concern for many masters.
Further, Sabnis provides context for Lucian’s own exposure to theories of enslavement and slavery itself to explain his characters’ response in Lynchopolis. More specifically, we unpack Lucian’s biographic background. As a resident of Samosata, a city Syrian city on the Euphrates River, Lucian most likely would have interacted with the slave trade in the Roman Empire. In addition to his everyday experience, Lucian also would have read Aristotle’s theories of enslavement, in which the philosopher employs the analogy between master and slave and craftsman/tool. His philosophy differentiates between animate and inanimate tools. Thus, he categorizes slaves as animate tools. While Aristotle did not use lamps to prove his assertions, the light source when alight does “connect with an element superior to its rudiment material [just as] the slave may contain a rational soul, despite their legal status and degraded body.” Sabnis’s claim draws the connection between Lucian and Aristotle yet also note stark differences. Where Aristotle dehumanizes the enslaved and proposes that the enslaved are deficient, Lucian questions the premise of natural slavery. By endowing the lamps with voices and reason, Lucian elucidates that slaves are rational beings thus fueling his fear.
