Lucian’s Introductions

Abstract

Abstract Lucian’s introductions (or prolaliai) and comparable pieces by other ancient writers have never been exactly showered with scholarly attention; in this century, apart from two recent short papers by Graham Anderson and Robert Bracht Branham, there are only two articles published in 1949 by Karl Mras and still earlier a Konigsberg dissertation De prolaliarum usu rhetorico of 1911 by Aloysius Stock, who, taking Lucian’s pieces as a starting-point, succeeded in outlining the general development of the form of prolaliai in antiquity. Short treatments of Lucia nic prolaliai can, of course, be found in more general works on Lucian. Authors of these, like Jacques Bompaire and Christo pher Robinson, tend to take a positive view of Lucian’s intro ductions; not so Graham Anderson, who dismisses them as belonging to ‘the slightest trifles among the vast amount of ephemera produced by the Second Sophistic’ . We shall have to take sides in this controversy; but first something has to be said about the genre or sub-genre (or whatever) of the rhetorical introduction of prolalia as such.

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