Laura Bottenberg

Friendship and Otherness in Lucian’s ›Toxaris‹ : A Literary Commentary Laura Bottenberg

In Lucian’s Toxaris, the characters’ speeches play a performative role as they become their deeds of friendship. Between irony and (self-)othering, past and present, the dialogue negotiates a mixed form of identity by affirming a Hellenocentric position and deconstructing an Athenocentric per-spective on Greek culture. Eventually, both aspects converge, as the characters’ ability to make speeches on friendship displays their mastery of Greekness.

This book, itself a hybrid of commentary and monograph, consists of an introduction, which con-textualises the dialogue in its cultural, philosophical, and literary background; the Greek text with textual critical notes, followed by an English translation; and a commentary, which is organised ac-cording to the central themes of the dialogue: the representation of friendship and the decon-struction of stereotypes. The commentary helps us to better understand how friendship is ap-proached in this dialogue and how the latter relates to the value of friendship in the context of the Roman imperial period. Simultaneously, it provides an examination of the way in which different voices – serious or deriding, Greek or Scythian, etc.

– are ambiguously entangled in Lucian’s dia-logue.