Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Translation

This important diachronic study of the life and works of Lucian of Samosata investigates the varied images of the Sophist from Syria from late Antiquity to the seventeenth-century. Using sources in Patristic literature, Byzantine glosses, the Neo-Latin satire of the Quattrocento, the Vitae Luciani, and Golden Age texts, Zappala demonstrates how the writings of Lucian are fragmented into a series of "authors": the historiographer, the writer of fantasy, the moralist, the atheist, the stylist. The study illustrates the dynamic relationship between a fixed text and the cultural translation which "unfixes" that text and spins it out onto surprising, paradoxical recreations. Both in its sources and its treatment, this work is a groundbreaking study which illuminates previously unstudied areas of the continuing mutation of Classical literature in the European heritage.