Is Lucian a Reliable Narrator?

Friday, October 30, 2026 - 11:30 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Many people have tried to relate Lucian's 5th Dialogue of the Courtesans either to actual Roman attitudes towards women's same-sex relationships, or to the reality of those relationships. The problem is that, not only is any underlying truth filtered through an elite male author, there isn't always agreement on what Lucian's purpose was in writing the dialogues. Bissa tries to use internal evidence in the text to tackle some of these questions. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #583 Bissa 2013 Man, Woman or Myth About LHMP Full citation: Bissa, Errietta M.A. 2013. “Man, Woman or Myth? Gender-bending in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans” in Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, No. 70: 79-100 Lucian’s dialogue #5 has been analyzed from many different angles, with a corresponding number of conclusions about whether and how it reflects the reality of female same-sex relations in classical Greece…