Lucian's Assembly of the Gods: An Intermediate Greek Reader: Greek Text with Running Vocabulary and Commentary

by Lucian of Samosata, Stephen A. Nimis, Edgar Evan Hayes

The aim of this book is to make The Assembly of the Gods by Lucian of Samosata (c. 120 – 190 CE) accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Greek. The running vocabulary and grammatical commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page, so that readers can progress through the text, improving their knowledge of Greek while enjoying one of the most entertaining authors of antiquity. This short dialogue presents Momus, the god of blame, arguing that numerous gods and their entourages should be expelled from heaven for being fraudulent immigrants. These figures range from gods and heroes with a human parent to various "eastern" deities, whose unhellenic appearance and behavior is objectionable. A number of famous mythological stories are referred to as evidence of the unsuitability of various gods and goddesses to their home on Olympus, but not without implying that the behavior of Zeus himself is often petty and hypocritical. Lucian's The Assembly of the Gods is a great text for intermediate readers. It is breezy and fun to read with relatively simple sentence structure. The diatribe of Momus sounds some of Lucian's favorite satirical and literary themes. It delineates the pettiness of quarrels over status and the hypocrisy of the powerful. It also provides implicit and explicit criticism of the verisimilitude and logic of traditional accounts of the gods. The language of Athenian democratic institutions is invoked throughout, which also humorously humanizes the Olympian figures. Finally, imperial inscriptions suggest a more specific context and impetus for this satire. Revised April, 2016.

66 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2015

About the author

Lucian of Samosata was a Greek-educated Syrian rhetorician, and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.

Reviews

[Anna]

I'm reading this for *uni* for my module on the Greek Gods in literature, and writing an essay on how seriously we can take the gods in Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods. The answer is, a midpoint. They're nuts - complete and utter piss-takes of the original 'religious' literature (or 'more serious' literature) we see in the Homeric Hymns, the Homeric epics, and Hesiod - BUT they raise some important points, about the philosophy of love, the power of love, the terror of the gods mixed with their more jocular formats. Lucian may have lived during a time of decreasing paganism under the Roman Empire, but the essential questions that lie behind the gods in their conventional forms are still there in Lucian, just parodied a little.
I will add that these are typically ancient in their 'humour', so you might want to avoid 3 (Apollo and Dionysus; rape jokes) and 10 (Zeus and Ganymede; pederasty (romanticised pedophilia)). The best dialogue, in my opinion, is the one between Hera and Zeus (22). The funniest is between Pan and Hermes (2).

[Daniel C]

Got this book to prepare for a reading class of Plato's "Republic" and the dialogue aspect really helped a great deal. The content of the dialogues is fairly common myth so it is pretty easy to follow the Greek. I really like the format of Faenum Publishing's books and will likely continue to work through their offerings. They are a good stepping stone to the Steadman readers.

[Peter]

This book is so slim that it barely deserves to be its own book in terms of page count. In terms of content, it's good all on its own.

The format is great. I really like what Faenum is doing for intermediate Greek readers.