Bronze for Gold: Subjectivity in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans

This paper analyzes the construction of subjectivity in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans. Lucian manipulates expectations by mingling the characters of comedy with the form of philosophy and thus produces a complex subject. A close reading of Dialogue 6 suggests that through a cryptic allusion to Plato and Homer, Lucian presents the courtesan through the lens of elite Greek masculine subjectivity. The subject that emerges in this dialogue through the interplay of male and female, past and present, and high and low culture embodies the anxieties of the sophist in the Roman empire.