Lucian and declamation

Given the attacks on rhetoric elsewhere in his corpus, it is a surprise to find Lucian declaiming. Scholars have explained this apparent contradiction using the periodization that Lucian himself offers, assigning the works to a supposed earlier, rhetorical phase. But literary periodization has rightly come to be regarded as problematic, and is rejected in this paper also. I study the Tyrannicida, and show that the work is quite at home in the corpus: read closely, and in particular, against Choricius’ version of the same scenario, it emerges as a witty, insightful, and truly Lucianic perversion of a contemporary social phenomenon.