Abstract

As is well known, Lucian’s masterpiece Verae Historiae can be read as a travesty of Homer’s Odyssey. The present paper argues that with his fantastic voyage Lucian reacts not just to the Odyssey itself but also to the recent interpretation of the Odyssey by the Middle Platonic and Neopythagorean philosopher Numenios of Apameia. Lucian’s purpose, therefore, in writing the Verae Historiae was presumably to give back to Odysseus some of the resilience that interpretations like that of Numenios had taken away from him, and in general to set mythological poetry free once again from the constraints the philosophers had laid on it.