The Art and Rhetoric of Lucian’s Hippias

Abstract

Lucian’s brief essay,Hippias or The Bath, has been declared spurious, disparaged as frivolous, considered an ironic parody, and generally ignored. Yet it contains the only detailed description of a Roman bath complex (Yegül 1979; 2010) and displays a remarkable command of topics in the eulogistic and epideictic tradition (priamel, ring-composition,praeteritio, apologeticenvoi) that extends from Pindar to the Second Sophistic. This article locatesHippiasin Lucian’s literary program; provides a close, sequential reading of the entire essay that takes into account its thematic vocabulary, style, and rhetoric; and discusses its metaliterary characteristics and its probable idealization of the architect and his baths.