I want to preface this by reading an excerpt from one of Lucian's dialogues called The Dream or Lucian's Career. Within this, he talks about how he has the choice between becoming a craftsman like his uncle or pursuing the culture of being a learned statesman and, you know, amazing thinker of his age. So this is what culture says to him. If you'll be persuaded by me, I will first of all show you many works of men of old and tell you of the marvelous words and deeds and make you familiar with practically everything. I shall adorn your soul, the most essential part of you, with many noble ornaments, moderation, justice, piety, gentleness, fairness, understanding, endurance, love of beauty, and a yearning to achieve the sublime. You will miss nothing in the past, nothing which is now due to happen, and you will even foresee the future in my company. In short, I shall very soon impart you all knowledge, human, and divine. Now with this, I believe it's very poignant for how I think Lucian saw himself. Today we have a guest who knows a thing or three about Lucian. So without further ado, let's get the intros out of the way. So you guys know what the show is. This is the season two live premiere of We Are Being Transformed. Here we explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. Our guest this morning is Dr. Karen Navali. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of Classics at John Hopkins University. She is the author of two monographs, Reading Fiction with Lucian and the Moon and the Greek and Roman Imagination. Her research interests include Greek literature and culture, ancient fiction, and the ancient scientific imagination. So Dr. Navali, welcome to the show. How are you? Hi, Jason. Very nice to meet you and your guests. Thank you. Likewise. Welcome to the show. It's a huge honor. And like I was saying at the beginning, you know quite a bit about our subject today, favorite of both of ours, Lucian of Samoseta. But we can't just hop in solution, right? We have to define some stuff first. So because we can't simply jump into Lucian, we must first give a brief sketch of the intellectual and literary milieu in which he existed. So the literature of the Roman Empire from roughly circa 50 to 300 CE, pardon me, is labeled in scholarship the second Sophistic. Now Dr. Navali, what was the second Sophistic and what are some of the hallmarks of that age? Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the title, it does a very good job of what titles do as in it simplifies things. And there's been a lot of unease in the last maybe 15 years or so with the title and how useful it is for giving us a portal into the world of Greek literature, literature in the Roman Empire. Because originally the title really just describes a type of style of oratory. And I guess was used for a long time to focus on or one of the problems of the title is that it invites us to focus on just one of the types of literature in this period. Whereas the period was the output, the kind of literature that was produced was more varied and diverse than this title would suggest. So what were the hallmarks of the age? Well, the kind of elite Sophistic literature that people usually think of when they say second Sophistic is the so-called atticizing, rhetorical, oratory and declamatory works. These are largely works where people are Sophists, these great traveling showmen and public speakers are getting up and speaking on impromptu on topics suggested by the audience and showing off their ability to speak in classical Attic Greek. It's quite a feat because the Attic Greek that they're speaking, this atticizing tendency that I mentioned, it's the kind of Greek that would have been spoken in 5th century BCE Athens. So maybe some 700 years ago it would be like you or I standing up and declaiming on improvisatory on a topic in Talsyrian English. So very, very strange. But that kind of high style academic display speeches would be a hallmark of the period. Cut me off at any time if I'm talking too much, by the way. But I think other hallmarks are a very keen sense of awareness of the heritage from the classical past in the language, like I've just mentioned. But also try an effort to emulate what was perceived as the great authors of the classical canon, so your Homer, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon to mention a few. So an attempt to emulate their style and kind of bring it back to life under the Roman Empire. But there's also new literature being, so it's not just backward looking, there's new literature being produced. For example, the Greek and the Roman novel is born, really, or rather really comes into its own in this period. So there are some features I could go on and on and on, but I'll just throw those out to get us started. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of like asking you to define the last 50 years of American history or whatever. Well, yeah. Sure. And there are other things I think you could, and it's important to say, because that's just focusing on the kind of elite literature. But there is a lot more going on besides, which really has an important influence on the literature and also the way people think at the time. I think one of those things just to point out would be, we're dealing with the Roman Empire, this great bureaucratic machine, and it's the high point of various other things, like information technology, thinking of inscriptions. This is really the epigraphical habits, so-called, is really reaching its high point in, say, the second century CE. So people are engaging with messages that are being sent out in the form of letters. And so information technology in that sense, also decoding and deciphering public or political messages to imagery as well, and the desire to collect and amass information. The archive is building up, so you get plenty of the elders, great encyclopedia, and other huge compendias, works like that. So it's very to my mind, I think, an age of information technology and information culture as well. And with all of the anxieties that that brings, that we're very familiar with today, with crises of authority, how do you know what to believe, can you trust what you're reading, all those kinds of things. So I just mentioned those. They're not necessarily literary, but they are certainly, I think, influencing some of the things that particularly interest you. Yeah, absolutely. I think what I would add is that this period, the second sophistic, is not only emphasizing the Atticism, but also there's a great emphasis, and that goes hand in hand with Paideia on Mimesis, right? And this leads to what Wittmarsh would call the politics of imitation, which is like defining oneself's Greekness versus this new, vast information technology that roam as an empire, an unprecedented kind of thing for the world. So these people, these writers are defining themselves through many ways of past that didn't exist, that they're obviously, we all look at the past through rose colored glasses and go, okay, there was a Halcyon kind of existence back then that we can harken back to, and it was very much, the literature, I think is brilliant. You mentioned Greek novels, I love like, I love to read me some Achilles Tacius, or a Cariton, you know, I love to read that stuff just, you know, in my spare time. It's really funny. When I was reading your book, it really made me kind of realize, yeah, I couldn't read the books that way, like she's saying that Dionysius reads, you know, the letter from. The Lecher. Yeah, from. Yeah, it's very, very funny, like you read it that way, it's like, oh, well, it's a guilty pleasure. So it's kind of like, we're still reading it the same way in a sense. But yeah, so much we could say about that. So essentially, this is the thought world and the economic powerhouse that Lucian comes up in. These are, these literary and philosophical things are the balls of wax used to craft, right? Love that. Well, it's very, very appropriate for Lucian, yeah. Yeah, you know, he can shape it as he pleases and create reality itself. So this question may be more complicated than it sounds. It sounds simple, but who exactly was Lucian? And what are some examples of why he's paradigmatic of the intellectual and literary thought of the Second Sophistic, both as a product of the Paideia, and as an elite cultural producer, eventually himself. Yeah. And I think it's, I think you're right, that isn't, in many ways, a more difficult question to answer than it might seem, because we really don't know much about Lucian. For all that he is very apparently self disclosing in his work. So you opened the podcast, our conversation with that lovely passage from a work of his called The Dream, which it purports to be an autobiographical essay. But with Lucian, there are always questions of how straightforwardly can we read any autobiographical claims, because he also always makes us aware that there's a potential gap or distance between the eye who is speaking in whatever work we're reading, and the eye, you know, the flesh and blood person who is always beyond the page, beyond the text. And you can never quite trust that you're getting to him. So he's very self disclosing apparently. But for all that we, so on the one hand, we can think or get the impression that we know a lot about him or feel like we get to know him. But he's not an author about whom we have much external information on whom we have many external coordinates at all. So he's famously left out of Philostratus' canon of the Sophists of the era. He doesn't mention Lucian as one of them, which suggests that Lucian wasn't one of the superstars. He wasn't one of the big, you know, A-listers of the Second Sophistic. And we know, well, he tells us that he was working, he traveled around some of the Western Empire, so Masalia, modern-day Marseille, Gaul. And these are not really the very fashionable A-list locations. So the superstars are going to be in the great cities of the Greek East. And Lucian isn't playing to those audiences. So he seems to be maybe a B-lister who, you know, we have very little information on him. For all that, he stands out, I think, as one of the figures of this period. And that's partly because he's extremely prolific. He writes lots and lots, and lots of different types of works. So he's really, that's one of the reasons I think he's so captivating. If you're interested in the philosophical culture of the period, there's a lot he writes on and writes about. He writes on the religious culture of the period, the intellectual culture. He's a fiction writer. He's a writer of oratory and rhetoric. So he really, there's a lot there to cater to many different tastes. So among the other reasons, then, that he stands out as a figure of the period. He's what we might call an outsider. He mentioned he's from the city of Samosata in Syria. There's a good chance that Greek was not his first language, that he acquired it later. He writes beautiful, copperplace, Attic Greek. In many ways, the hallmarks of, you know, somebody who has learned it as a second speaker. And many of the superstar performers of this period were not born in, you know, what we would call Greece, but came from other parts of the Greco-Roman world and learned Greek culture, this Paideia, and became super wealthy and things like that. So he's kind of paradigmatic of that sort of thing. But I think he's also in his work, you know, I mentioned all the different sorts of themes he covers. He's plugged right into the pulse of the intellectual culture and entertainment culture of the period. And he's satirizing it and playing with it. So I think if you want to get a sense of many different facets of the culture of this period, Lucien's work gives you a very good sample of that in written in this beautiful Attic Greek, which is very accessible to read. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, it's really fascinating. You would think, like you said, we really don't know that much about him.  It's kind of like the Rhetorician or whatever, giving some kind of background or expounding upon something. And Lucien, these are when Lucien drops these little Easter eggs, as it were, about who he is. But like you said, he's constantly playing around with it. And he's playing around with the reality versus the red. And he's orienting it based on where he wants the reader to go and the narrative, so to speak. That's something you point out in your in the first chapter of reading fiction with Lucien, which I really love. Thank you. Yeah, he's talking a lot about, sorry, I shouldn't do a bit of intro, but he's talking a lot about, we can see, I think, some of his preoccupations in those little proleia, those little pro-lobo preparatory works. And he's, what's pretty clear is that he really, really wants to capture the elite audience. He wants to be one of those A-listers. But he knows his cachet is, he has a strong popular appeal. And he's uneasy with that. Or at least the game that he plays is that he's uneasy with that. And that he's trying to appeal not just to a popular audience who appreciates how novel and surprising and exotic his work is. And he's also trying to get people to notice how artful and considered and how, yeah, I think artful is probably, you know, how he's actually, you know, he's doing all of the hard work as well. He wants to get the elite audiences to appreciate that. So that's certainly a preoccupation for him, which is really interesting because it tells us that, you know, the second sophisticated wasn't just about these elite audiences. There are popular audience members there as well. And Lucien is very, very attuned to those. Yeah, we're definitely going to get into that a little bit later in the interview. And that's one of the great things we were talking earlier about what I like about Lucien. And I love how he straddles that line between the supposed high culture and the low culture, you know, he shares that in common with a lot of, I think a lot of the creators of his contemporaries, like Apolaus and people like that, you know, they have a fascination with low culture, but also they have aspirations. And you really see that in something with Lucien, especially with the, you are a literary Prometheus, like where he's like, he's like, why do people like this? And do you like it for the reasons I want you to like? Because it's a novel kind of subject or are you appreciating all the stuff I put into it and the artfulness I put into it? So yeah, it's fascinating. He's having his cake and eating it there.  And while he's denigrating that, of course, he's also at the same time advertising those qualities. So I think he's not somebody, he's making a play of distancing himself from the populace, but at the same time advertising what non-elite audience would appreciate about his work. And it's interesting to me that he then has a whole essay on trying to redeem an art form like pantomime, which is very populist, or writing an essay on astrology, which again is something that's spread like wildfire and crosses the elite and popular boundary all over the place. So I think that's one of the reasons I kept thinking of Echo, Oberto Echo, when I was thinking of Lucien because he seems to me to be, you know, nothing is beneath his attention in a way. You know, in the way that Echo was this extraordinary medievalist and semi-autician and yet was writing about the James Bond books of Superman comics and, you know, and going to Disneyland and writing wonderful essays or writing an essay about, you know, what happened to him when his genes got too, he got too fat and his genes felt too tight on him. You know, everything is for thinking about. And I think Lucien, whilst it's not the same, there's something of that kind of just intellectual curiosity and interest in the popular. However much he tries to distance himself from that. Yeah, Lucien, I think Echo, like Lucien, they both, they understand very much like how do I want to say this? They very much understand like the, you know, like Echo, like you said, is like an extraordinary medievalist, but he's also talking about popular culture. And Lucien is the same way. He's very much like, I can drop all these allusions to Homer in my work, but I'm also talking about like the PGM, like in the fill up suites like with the ghost haunted house story. And he's talking a lot about Charlotte, like philosophical charlatans of philosophical and religious persuasion. So he's very much all over the place. And I think they both kind of, they like to play around with that to subvert. Because, you know, you have purists on both sides. And, you know, they're like kind of flaunting what they can do with their written word. So yeah, it's a great, it's a great comparison. I like how you did that when all of your essays in the book. So we've talked about this concept of Lucien's self presentation in his work, and how that kind of speaks to the crisis of authenticity going on during the Second Sophistic. Something Lucien's obviously very well aware of. It's a world obsessed with the fake, the hyper real, the paradoxical, you know, like you mentioned in the last chapter, the literature and the philosophical thought of this time really is living hand in hand with a world of the miraculous, right, of a wonder comma, as you said, of Eucrity's house, but also in the world like with the tomatons and puppets and all these really crazy things that are going on. And you have like, for instance, the popularity of Flagon of Trailies, right, with his paradoxica. So it's very much like going hand in hand. And it's a time that's very obsessed with the, almost like the grotesque, and in the hyper real that's perhaps even preferable to reality in some senses. Yeah, I think in many ways it must have been, there are many different areas in, or there were many different areas in life that were playing with that boundary between illusion and the authentic, I suppose, or the theatrical. So I suppose we see it today in political behavior. It can be very staged. And the thing is that, I suppose, the more savvy audience, the more savvy the audience is, the more they are in on it. And they realize they can decode the behavior for what it is. But you get similar, you have a similar, similar sense of, say, in the courts, the imperial courts, people are very much role playing. And there are certain, certain things that one says on certain occasions. So you have this strong sense of, you know, you're wearing a mask. And if you've also got this culture, then this elite performance culture, where you have these sophists performing, speaking a language that is not actually spoken, you know, it's an artificial language. They are acting in a sense. They're acting the role of an atasist, a classical Greek. And one of the things about those, one of the perilous qualities about that kind of intellectual culture and political culture is the risk that is going with what happens if you let the mask slip, if you make a mistake. And I think it's one of the reasons that I find Lucian very interesting thinking of him in terms of academic culture, actually. Because it's very much, we speak about what is the imposter syndrome. And Lucian talks about that. He has an essay where he talks about having made a greeting to somebody in a non-standard attic way, that he used the wrong word, the wrong greeting, and that this gave away, you know, that he really wasn't, you know, he exposed his own lack of credentials, his own lack of learning. So you can imagine the anxiety that is attending this sort of intellectual culture. Everybody's watching out for you.  It's very much like the kind of academic culture at its worst. So I think politically, intellectually, this is very much a culture of appearances and performance. And then you have what's going on in the amphitheater, not to mention the theater, where, you know, in the amphitheater, public executions are being actually staged as myths being enacted as reality. So you're constantly getting this criss-crossing of reality and fiction. It's not just happening in literature, it's life, just as it is really for us in slightly different ways. So and Lucian is an author who is really attuned to that border. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love that you bring that up. Just the facts. I mean, I talk about this with a lot of guests, like John Kloppenberg, in terms of Greco-Roman associations, and Ed Watts in terms of Paide and that competitive culture, there in terms between teachers and things like that. It's a very agonistic culture, right, in general. Very performative.  Here you go to a banquet. There's performances. You know, it's a performance. You're on display. You were mentioning Lucian's dialogue. I think he wrote two of those, right? Yeah, and then he had to write a response to it later where, like, yeah, he tripped up on the, he didn't get his Greek quite right. Yeah, it's crazy. But yeah, like, everything's a performance. Everybody's watching. But like, we tend to think of that as alien, but I mean, it's not so different, like you said, from today, just in different ways. Just in different ways. And I think, you know, you mentioned there as well, the culture of miracles and this is very, you know, wonder workers and religious experts of one stripe or another are also charismatic leaders and figures are also very, very much a hallmark of culture at this time. And Lucian tends to be pretty scathing about them and diminish them. But, you know, it's clear from the success of many of these cults, and Alexia Petzalist, Dionida assistants and lovely work to show this that, you know, Lucian's excreation and satirizing of these figures is very much the elite view, but they had enormous popular success. So again, you're just like the Hall of Mirrors. You know, illusions and their success as charismatic leaders, a lot of that success is riding on the performance of wonders and illusions and miracles. So that's all a part of life as well. Not even to mention, not even to go into the territory of magic and magicians and magic wonder workers of that source. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Alexander, the false prophet says hello, right? Like, you tend to make fun of that, but like Glycon's cult went on for like 100 years after Alexander's. Oh, yeah, I believe he still has followers. Oh my gosh, yeah. I think if you look up Glycon, the snake god, there's still, I think it's still, I think quite say going strong, but I think there are still believers. So that's awesome. That's very impressive. Yeah. And he just touched upon magic real quick. I talked to Daniel Ogden about his book. He's actually coming back on next next week. Yeah, for sure. I talked to Daniel about the place. It's not just necromancy, but they had these places right there are designated. And then there's like these, these weird like caves, like where you would go in and very much a performative hyper real grotesque kind of performance as well. I love that. Well, I mean, in the essay, I mean, Daniel is wonderful on all of this. I mean, he's the expert. But in the in the essay that Lucian writes satirizing Alexander of Aboluteikos, one of these charismatic religious leaders with his cult of the snake god. And Daniel is the world expert on snakes in the ancient world as well. So he can tell you all about Glycon, the snake god. Lucian gives this wonderful description of how, and of course, he's coming from it from a very, coming at it from a very skeptical, you know, he's going to expose Alexander as the great charlatan and fraud that he that he is and he have and show how he dupes all the simpletons who believe him. And it's very kind of scathing attack. But he he gives us he brings us into Alexander's subterranean darkened chamber, you know, where he has this extraordinary sounds quite creepy, he has this puppet. Do you remember this is kind of like a puppet with like long Pythagorean hair, and like he's got somebody in the back somewhere, like, kind of like, you know, those things on the playground where kids can like talk into. Yeah, we can hear each other out here, like he's got somebody like, he's got someone in the back whispering through these tubes, so that the snake god appears to actually speak.  But from a religious, from the perspective of religious psychology, you can understand that, you know, and he talks about how people were motivated by fear and hope. So you have maybe people who are in desperate situations. And this snake god offers an answer. And then either there's this ritual of going down into this darkened space, and you're not sure quite what you're seeing and hearing, but something numinous is going on. You know, how I suppose I really enjoy the way he dismantles the kinds of tools of how you of religious theater of how you create new monocity. Now, he's been very scathing about it. But I think there's an underside to it as well, where you can really from the perspective of psychology and, you know, to look at how artful Alexander was in creating this experience, this religious experience for people, and it was enormously successful. So that's taking us maybe, you know, but it just shows you what one of the fascinating things about Lucian's works is that he takes you deep into the heart of religious culture, the religious experience. And one of the really kind of, then you go the next step and you realize, yeah, he's been very scathing about Alexander and he's presenting him as this kind of charlatan with a bag of tricks who travels from city to city deceiving people. And then you think to yourself, but hang on a second, what's Lucian doing? He's a traveler who's going around from city to city with his own oratorical bag of tricks, creating illusions and theater. And so actually Lucian himself isn't that far removed from a figure like Alexander or the other miracle workers or wonder workers that he's purporting to, that he's apparently denigrating. So I think he's colluding. He's inviting us to collude with that. I think he inflomes himself into that culture at the same time. So yeah. Yeah, he's definitely playing around with those borders again. Yeah. Yeah. Just especially by the fact that he's, he features them so much. Like you said, Lucian has a vast library and I think one of the things is like it's so good. I have yet to read something by Lucian that I'm not entertained by at least. I know. But like you read him and his work is populated, whether in the background or at the forefront with somebody like Alexander or Peregrinus, right? You got like in the Manipian satires, you got fictional, but Mithro Barzanes, right? So he's got these people and like that's a performative thing too, right? These people fit the bill of the pagan holy man, right? And that period of time. So yeah, fascinating stuff. So I know we're running low on time. So and like I said, Lucian has a huge backlog, but I wanted to focus on three works in particular of his fill up suites, Lover of Lies, of course, true true stories and touch upon the Manipian satires a little bit, the Nekomantia and Ikaro Manipus. So in your book, Reading Fiction with Lucian, when the analyzing fill up suites, you point to you cradies home as a veritable Vanda comma or cabinet of mystery, cabinet of curiosities, very much like Tramalchio's house, right? Like same thing. So I really love what you did there because it's a nice microcosm of what I feel Lucian is trying to do when he molds the narrative to break down the lines between the reader and the red and that high culture, that low culture. So I didn't know if you could just touch upon this a little bit. Yeah, sure. So I really liked the setting of the fill up suites with this house where you have a sick and infected man, he has gout and at one point Lucian is, well, there I go, Lucian is a character called T'Chiades who is for all intents and purposes standing in as the typically Lucian figure, as in he's the skeptical, you know, the skeptical voice. He's not called Lucian, Lucian uses a different name, so there's that distancing going on. But T'Chiades, who's the, let's say the Lucianic figure in the dialogue, is afraid to touch this sick man's foot because he's afraid of contagion, catching what he has. And I think that fear of contagion, you know, Lucian is quite clever with that because when we start the dialogue and T'Chiades goes into Eucreates' house, Eucreates is the guy who's laid up with gout.   And yet you find yourself lingering listening to the stories and kind of enjoying them despite the fact that you know you shouldn't, like that guilty pleasure you mentioned. And by the end, those lines have been blurred. We no longer can tell ourselves that we're quite so distant from this very low popular kind of ghost story fare. And in the end, the contagion that Lucian or the T'Chiades was fearful of at the start, it comes up again at the end where he and his friend have a conversation about madness. This time it goes from gout to more like madness, like a form of rabies, this is the word in Greek. And T'Chiades is afraid that he's been bitten and has is now seeing things because he's had so much, he's had his fill of ghost stories and he himself is beginning to see ghosts everywhere. So you've got that slow slide throughout the dialogue where by the end, you're no longer sure that you actually are separate because you've just enjoyed listening to all of these ghost stories. So absolutely, I think that's Lucian dissolving, liquefying that boundary that makes us feel quite small and self congratulatory. But we're not that clever, are we? So yeah, we're entering that house with T'Chiades and we're going into that book and seeing those wonders and kind of falling for the trick and maybe we are kind of succumbing to that vast mass contagion. Yeah, it's just fabulous, I love it. And yeah, just the scene where he's talking about all these philosophers who are supposed to be, you know, they're supposed to know better, right? But they have these ridiculous, like, I imagine like he's getting, these are the type of things you'd find in like the PGM, right? Like, I think one of them is like, oh no, but it has to be like a, a lioness. A wolf tooth, they're a lion tooth. Yeah, yeah. I imagine it's kind of like the recipes, the technology you would find in like the Greek magical poultry like they're using. And it's just amazing. Like, yeah, Lucian's not alone in that, like, even if you're reading something like Leucopy and Clytophon, like, or or, you know, keriton stuff, they're always constantly adding that in there as well. Like the, I believe in and Leucopy and Clytophon, there's a, the talk about the spring, you know, there's one section where they're talking about like a spring and I think it's directly taken from Tralee, is it himself? And it's just another one of those wonder kind of grotesque stories. It's very fascinating like how genres are kind of, they're leading into one another. Really genres are blended and yeah, blending into each other, it's really fascinating. I think that one of the really fascinating things with Lucian on these issues is he's really interested in, in why is it that we enjoy listening to things that we now aren't true?   And yet here they all are spending their time listening to things which are obviously impossible and not true. And yet, that's not the same thing as lies, they're not being deceived. So there's some gray area in between where we do a very odd thing, and we do this when we go to the theater or the cinema to use a modern context as popular context. We willingly go and sit down and let ourselves believe in the truth of something that we know is not true. And the more we allow ourselves to believe it, the greater our enjoyment goes up. So there's something really very odd that happens there, and Lucian wants to get into the psychology of that. What is fiction? You know, it's a kind of madness in a way, because we are allowing ourselves to believe in things that we know aren't true, they're not really there, they're not really happening. Yeah. Anyway, that's one of the things I think is really interesting about them, because Greek doesn't have a very good word for fiction really. There's pseudos, which is lie, and then there are other words for, you know, realistic stories like plasma, but the word, the concept of fiction itself is a little bit difficult to pin down. Yeah, absolutely. I named the show after a book by a good friend of mine, Dr. M. David Litwa, and he has a book about how the Gospels became history. You know, we tend to think of these things, right? But like, and he points that out, like, you have the three different divisions of what history versus fable versus what a myth is, and it's not as clear cut as we would have it today. And I just wanted to touch upon this really quick. I love this quote in your book. You point out that in Lucian's hands, mimesis becomes a quasi-magical process, which animates or better, revivifies art. So could you touch upon this a little bit? I actually, it's one of those things, it's a very strange experience to me, but I, when I read, when I read this, you know, I couldn't remember what it was I'd written, and I was looking at it and I was thinking, what the hell did I mean? So I actually had to go back to page 16 of the book and read it. And I think there I was talking about how he has in these two particular dialogues, one is the dialogue called images and then the other one is, I can't remember now, in defensive images and then, I'm not going to remember the title, but in the second essay, the woman who has been, so one of these essays is about really using images to create, to conjure a woman, and then the other essay is part of their piece, the real woman and not the mimetic, not the representation, but the real woman herself speaks back and criticizes the work of art. And I'm no longer quite sure what I meant by that though, so a magical process which animates or revivifies art. I now think more generally what I had in mind was how Lucian composes, kind of he's a great recycler, so he takes bits and like the jigsaw pieces and a good friend and a Lucian scholar, Nicolo Dalcanzo, once compared Lucian to Quentin Tarantino, and I think the analogy is a very interesting one because he's doing something very much like that pastiche and mishmash, recycling scenes from old movies and creating something new, I mean there's a kind of a magic that happens there and you can create something new that's just entirely made. Yeah, so I think that's what I, that's more generally what I have in mind, I think. Yeah, that's a great analogy, especially with a filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino who's very much like, Tarantino is very much like he wears his influences on his sleeve and he's very much doing the same thing as Lucian does, which is like you're saying he's taking the best, maybe he's working with a theoretical framework, he's taking the best and he's creating like his own kind of subversive world out of it, and that's the magic of it right, like that's what Lucian is doing, especially in this next text that I wanted to kind of talk about. I know it's a favorite of both of ours, so the true stories. I want to touch on that one first because you said you regard that as the iconic work of its age, so how is Lucian getting back to what we're talking about in terms of like the magical process that Lucian is working on, how does Lucian play around with questions of candidacy and hyper-reality in a work like True Stories? So I think both of those terms, I was really thinking about the long episode in Book Two on the Isle of the Blast in particular and then that becomes a microcosm for what he's doing in the whole work, but it's particularly concentrated there because that world, if people know the work, is a very literary world.  So the Isle of the Blast is all about the canon really and Larry Kim, Lawrence Kim has written beautifully about this where basically the Homeric poems are just, you know, they, their influence exerts themselves, any attempt to break away from, there are, we're rather, there are constant attempts to break away from the story as Homer told it. So the best example of that being when, you know, Odysseus who's living happily ever after on the Isle of the Blast with Penelope, all he wants to do is get off the island and go back to Calypso and, and shack up with her.  So in that sense he's playing with canonity, the influence of Homer in particular. And hyper-reality, I think what I was thinking there was very much hyper-reality in the sense that Echo, Umberto Echo uses it in his essay, Faith of Fakes where he's writing this essay on North American, I suppose North American white culture at the time when he was writing and how it's very much feels an inferiority to or it's uneasy, no, and it's an easy relationship with European culture and how it tries to recreate European culture but to go on better all the time. And it seems to me that there was some resonance between that sort of cultural setup and the Roman Greek one that this emulation of the authors of the past but also an attempt to go on better than them. And Lucian on the Isle of the Blessed is kind of doing that because he doesn't just have Homer, he has Homer and all of them, you know, he's Plato, he's got, so and in a way that encapsulates the whole of the true stories where it's entirely a text that's made up of allusions to Homer and Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato. So it's essentially the ultimate pastiche, the ultimate homage or recycling of the past but then encapsulates the whole canon and goes on better, creates something new out of it, this magic that we were speaking. So does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I would add to that and when I kind of got out of the chapter was what Lucian's really doing in addition to, you know, creating the ultimate pastiche, the hyperreal that's probably better than the real thing in which he attempts to do this. I think what he's really doing is he's also making commentary on the second sophistic's kind of obsession with canon, canonicity. And it's really telling that even somebody like Homer wants to transcend what he's written before and has been trying to, he can't because everything he does is just like a repetition of the past and I love how you mentioned how like Odysseus, for example, giving the letter to Lucian when he's about to leave and it's even Odysseus' attempt to kind of rebel against the canon that's been set for him and it's just not happening because like Lucian's like, well, you know, he's like, I think when they had the war, I can't remember who they were between Homer. Oh, the battle of the dead heroes. Yeah, the dead heroes. Yeah. And Homer's just like re-recycling himself pretty much. It's awful.  It's very funny, but I think it's interesting because like Lucian's making this commentary and yet since he's playing with this ball of wax, he can create kind of whatever in terms of the expectations or subverting the expectations of the reader, depending on who it is, right? Yeah, so he's creating this whole work of art, which is playing with how, with the inescapability of the canon. And in doing that, he actually manages to create something innovative and new. So it's how you can. Do you remember, did you guys ever have the Wombles? Probably didn't. This was a very humble BBC children's program from I think the 70s or something, the Wombles, but they were these famously the Wombles, they were these kind of giant mouse-like, rat-like creatures, but their thing, their shtick was to Wumble around Wimbled and Common, picking up trash that people had discarded and making it into something new. So they're kind of eco-warriors in their day. But you know, it's that kind of wumbling magic that, you know, I suppose in a more elite sense that Lucian is, he's taking the jigsaw pieces of the past. And I suppose like Tarantino, he's not trying to pretend he's actually being original. He's actually just taking stuff that's already done, showing how you can recombine that and with totally old stuff, produce something startling and new. And that's a kind of form of magic, I think. Yeah, very much so. And he also, and the hyper-reality thing is he also, he doesn't pretend it's true. He says it's all fake. It's fake. I made it all up. He's not, you know, so that's the kind of, that's the hyper-reality comes into that as well, you know. Yeah, it's nice to read Philip Sude's and True Story's kind of back-to-back in a way. They complement each other in terms of like playing around with what is truth. Why do we believe? Why do we let ourselves be tricked? You know, I can watch like a movie like, I can watch Mr. Peabody in Sherman with my son back when he was like five and cry my eyes out at the end, even though I know it's just the movie, right? It's just the anime movie.  And it speaks to that postmodern, whether it's Lucian or Tarantino today, it speaks to that kind of postmodern sensibility. Absolutely. I like to say, and a lot of times people don't really realize this, but even Homer himself, right, is in a way a kind of postmodern retreading of these ancient stories, right? Like, tell me of Muse of the Wrath of Achilles, like the anger of Achilles. And he's got this story that's very traditional, but like the emphasis, the things he chooses to emphasize in the Iliad, very, very, like, you know, it's not just this, I mean, there's a lot of war and people dying. And this guy, Patrick, the son of this guy, or this guy was valiant. And he, no more, he was in the shadows. But like, we have a lot of that, but you also have a lot of really introspective subversive things and and Homer. And so, so this is not as new as like we would like to say. Absolutely not. And, you know, in a work like The Odyssey as well, you know, it's a work that's a poem that's very aware of itself and even is playing around with, I think we're pretty sure of this. It's clearly playing around with alternative versions of its own story that we're circulating at the time. So all of those creaking tales where in the second half of the poem where Odysseus is telling stories about Odysseus, he's disguised as a beggar and he's telling stories about Odysseus in the third person. Odysseus is doing other things, you know, that this is the poem Homer's Odyssey alluding to and in corporate absorbing into itself, alternative Odysseys that we're circulating at the time. So it's, you know, this kind of self consciousness. And yeah, there's there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah, absolutely. It's very I'm rereading it because I'm talking to Jackie Murray about race and antiquity, obviously the Black Achilles thing. But yeah, just struck me like people tend to look at these things and they think it's a very stifling classicism about Homer, but like Homer is very, very postmodern in what he's doing. He's very, it's brilliant. But that's digressing. I know we're running short on time, so I'll try to make this quick. I don't know how much time you have left, but I'm fine.  So I appreciate it, Dr. Nevelli. So we've talked about true stories. And I wanted to digress a bit into the Minnipian fantasies. For me, they're a good companion to true stories, his tracks, because Minnipus has an anabasis and a catascopia. He goes down to the underworld and the Neccomantia. And then he goes up to the moon, you know, in a caro minnipus. And I think there's also a text where it's Charon or something. Yeah, they pile the mountains up and it's very much philosophically like a caro minnipus. But what's very striking about these stories, and this is going to tie into your second monograph, both prominently feature trips to the moon. So if you could touch upon what role the moon played in the philosophical and literary thought of antiquity, how does Lucian utilize and subvert these expectations? Sure. So the moon, and actually you mentioned Robin Walsh, I think. Yeah, we were talking about before about how she's a big fan of yours. And her article on Paul and the Moon, yeah. That's right, yeah. And I think she writes amazingly on Wonders and Act of Deep Office as well. Maybe Robin's article on Paul and the Moon that I have in mind. Yeah, she engages with this as well, you know, or she argues that Paul is engaging with this. These ideas that are floating around in middle Platonism, where so the moon is basically thought of as a kind of a cosmic junction. In a very simple sense in that it appears quite clearly to be positioned between the earth here, and the sun farther out or higher up, and the moon is half, you know, midway between the two. So it's seen as being physically like a junction between us and the sun, and then that spiders out to acquire all kinds of metaphysical connotations. So it's seen as being a sort of an intermediate way station for the soul. So when we die, our body dies on the earth, and we physically our physical remains decompose, but our soul is released out of the body at death. And the soul rises, the non corporeal part, rises up. And the ultimate destination is to be reunited with the sun, which is symbolic of the ultimate good and truth and beauty in this very clinic ideas. But because we've been trapped in a body, the soul has been living in a body, mortal body, and it's been behaving badly, at least some of its time on earth, the soul has to undergo purification. And where that happens is on and around the moon. The moon is sort of like an intermediary cosmic way station for processing and cleansing purifying souls. And some of the souls then are dispatched down from the moon back into new bodies, sort of a form of reincarnation, where they undergo the process again. And they may have to do that several times before they can escape that cycle and finally make the journey to reunite with the sun. So the moon plays a very important role at this period of time in not just middle platonic but also stoic. The stoics have this belief too that there are souls flitting around the moon. So the moon is associated with the afterlife and the underworld paradoxically as it might seem at this time. Yeah, I love that. And if I'm not mistaken, the moon is also in a lot of philosophical thought at the time, considered to almost be like a mirror exaggeration of the earth. Like everything's very exaggerated. People are bigger there. There's fantastic creatures, much like you find in true stories, right? And just the moon is like a mirror of earth is you find that in true stories where you can go down and there's this very strange, surreal kind of mirror where you can see the people on earth and everything they're doing. And Lucien's like, well, I'm not sure if they saw me, but if you don't believe me, you could go up and see.  Absolutely. I think, yeah, there's a long tradition of speculating. You look up at the moon no matter where you are on earth and one of the first things that fascinates everybody is those blotches on the lunar surface. And they're interpreted in different ways. And we tend to see a face in other parts of the world in China. For example, I think they tend to see a rabbit. Other people see a man or a human form. So there is this long tradition in ancient Greek and Roman thought of speculating what those blotches in the so-called face, they saw a face, what they are. And one prevalent theory was that the whole of the moon is a giant celestial mirror hung over our earth. And those blotches are actually reflections, mirror reflections of the earth's oceans. So the moon is a kind of a map to our world in a strange way. And that speaks at a deeper level of the entanglement between the moon and the earth. That there's this sense in which the two worlds are connected. Which is one of the reasons why the moon then becomes, I suppose philosophically, a platform for detachment where you can go and from a great distance turn around and look back at the earth and get a view of the whole and contemplate it often satirically. So the moon is kind of this place of distance but also entanglement with the earth. And that mirroring reflection plays out in that satirical mode, I think. Yeah, I love the scene in Icaro Manipus when Manipus goes up there and he kind of recreates the shield of Achilles when he's looking down on the earth and he's seeing all these things. Wonderful, yeah. Yeah, going on and it's like there's such profound philosophical insight, you know, like talking about like we were talking earlier off the air about how much I love Lucian because in between all his very funny stuff, like he has very profound thoughts about how we're all just sometimes fate is in charge and she assigns us different roles. We don't always have control over that but depending on where we are, we play different roles and we wear different clothes and I think that's really the Manipian satires are really paradigmatic of that because you have Manipus and Mithro Barzani's like they're wearing, they're being fakes pretty much like they have to dress up and you know be different depending on the situation and I love that. And you get in the view from the great view from the moon that you were describing there in Icaro Manipus, you get that sense that life is almost a pageant just playing out, it's a spectacle and you know and as you said Lucian, it's like Enos is the character in the Icaro Manipus. He compares what he's seeing to the Shield of Achilles so it's you know one of the things that really fascinates me about that more recently has been thinking about that Lucian is really grappling with there, the difficulty of how do you process seeing everything all at once, how do you articulate that and I think that vision that he has is engaging with the idea of the map you know as something that encapsulates everything and shrinks it down, those kinds of ideas and you know this is a period where the Romans are mapping the world and but it's you know if you have everything it's connecting to that compendious impulse as well like we see in Pliny's encyclopedia you know the effort to incorporate everything into one work, well Lucian goes to the moon in his thought experiment and sees everything all at once. Yeah there's a film isn't there at the moment, everything. Oh yeah it's such an amazing movie, I'd recommend it. I haven't seen it. You must see it, it's really good, it's really good. But yeah Lucian's, like these characters have like an almost like Dr. Manhattan, like if you've ever read Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dr. Manhattan like on the moon like contemplating everything everywhere all at once. Oh let's check that out. Yeah it's very interesting. And you said I mean you know it's deeply engaged with a philosophy because Stoicism is very popular, very influential philosophy at the time and one of the exercises that Stoic's advise people to practice is to adopt the cosmic viewpoint. So to try, when you're you know when you're really annoyed with somebody or you're immersed in the troubles of life, try to detach yourself, try to imagine what your troubles would look like from a great distance like if you were up at the cosmos and looking down. And in a way Lucian is realizing that he actually has likeness go to the moon or step off on the moon on his way up to meet the gods. So he is engaging with that philosophical, contemporary philosophical exercise as well. Love that. Thank you for that answer. So we've talked a lot and I promise we only have a couple of more questions. Lucian is also paradigmatic. We touched upon this earlier but Lucian is paradigmatic of the second Sophistic in another sense and we talked about people like Petronius and Appalachus being the same kind of thing. They have a relationship with high and low culture often mixing the two with glee. And one thing that really stands out to me about Lucian and I've mentioned this in a lot of episodes is his frequent use of he's very familiar with not just like canonical Christian scriptures. He's familiar with a lot of non canonical stuff. He's he's a you know like we talked about suit up, fill up sudo's with the pgm stuff and we talked about the assorted philosophical and holy figures in his work both as subjects in his background figures and illusions. So why do you think why do you think Lucian was very speculative, irresponsible but love to hear your thoughts? Why do you think Lucian was so keen to mix these genres and motifs like he did? Well I think it goes back to your bulls of wax at the beginning. I love that image because it's an image that as we know Lucian himself uses in that apparently autobiographical essay where I don't know if you remember the little anecdote where he describes how when he was at school as a child and when he was bored in his lessons he used to scrape you know they'd have these wax tablets and he used to scrape the bits of wax and mold them into little farm animals which I think is just I can see him doing it it's just so endearing and that was one of the things that apparently made his parents think you will be a sculptor and of course he failed as a sculptor and I went on to become a a wordsmith so a crafter of images in a in a in a figurative sense I suppose and he comes back to this image of wax again and again to talk about his own work so in the pro-lally I these little crevatory essays where he's talking about them where he talks about himself very much as an artist he's he's not like the great prestigious artists like praxe italy's and you know other great sculptors who are working with enduring materials of prestige like marble and gold and ivory and he describes himself as an artist working with clay and wax and clay and wax are you know they're cheap materials and one of the great things about them at least until before you fire clay up it's infinitely moldable into different shapes so he's very much a kind of protean shape-shifting artist and I think that speaks to it says a lot about lucia how lucian conceptualized his own work he's not thinking of himself as in terms of prestige he's saying you know for better words I'm cheap and you know I I'm I'm second hand I I'm I'm not one of these great prestigious authors the canon is there but my materials are clay and wax and they're poorer materials but you can work magic with them you can change like those they're stuck in that shape forever marble statues can't do anything to change them like Homer on the Eye of the Bless it's canonicity it's frozen my stuff okay it may be recycled rubbish from Wimbledon common that the Wimbledon mumbles have picked up but you know I can fashion it into new things and I keep change keeps changing shape and it's actually one of the great things about lucian is that I think throughout history he has become different things to different cultures and he has this protean his work has this protean quality where it speaks to different ages to different cultures so that is all maybe a long way around of answering your question about genres I think this wax idea gets us close to something that is important solution I think which is breaking boundaries he talks about how he deliberately went about breaking boundaries between genres he took philosophical dialogue and he smushed it together with um old comedy and put a little bit of Minnipian satire in there and some other things and kind of mixed it all up and created something new um so he's all about melting boundaries and and and I think that's why his work is more porous and more absorbent of shall we say the kind of popular influences than high cultural works that are more sealed off and above it all I love I love that and I think he's really making a statement too when at the very beginning of that um the dream what he's talking about yeah I was so good with the wax creating these different animals and everything everybody thought I was great at it but then when my uncle handed me the chisel to work on the stone I went too hard and I broke it so yeah I gotta you know I got a pounding for that he was saying and I think that he's making a statement there about canonicity as well and maybe in a way that's just how I kind of interpret it he's like yeah wax wax and clay these things are my tools tricks of the trade um but give me a chisel in stone and maybe not so maybe not and of course wax is a writing material as well you know so it's also a way of talking about he's an artist with wax he is you know he's working with words and yeah I love that but I mean because it also ties into something that we don't really realize nowadays but things like paper things like you know publishing a book you know scrolls things like that's an expensive endeavor most people wrote on ostrica right things like wax tablets so I think in a way like he's he's establishing himself that way like I'm using these materials the common materials but I'm doing something very artful too something very different you know so I think in a way like he's not as humble as like you know no no no no he's advertising himself constantly yeah but yeah like you like you said like yeah it's like things like papyrus things like you know paper for lack of a better term all these things were super expensive and you know the common person is using ostrica they're using wax tablets things like that so well in his essay he has an essay about a book collector okay it's not it's not somebody writing with somebody who collects books and he pokes fun of him because he's all about worshiping these these very expensive copies and he talks about how he constantly polishes the knobs on the scrolls and you know and so that kind of yeah that there's that satirizing of prestige objects again um uh in another mode so where he this time talking about textual artifacts rather than say statues and that kind of thing he's more on the side of the ephemeral and yes here we are reading him two thousand years later so you know um take take it with a grain of salt he's he very much has an eye to surviving and a legacy at the beginning of the true stories he talks about you know wanting to have a stake in the freedom to make up stories and he talks about those who will read him later on so he very much has his eye on the future he wants to be read he wants to survive yeah illusions fascinating but also frustrating for me because like the preface to the true story like he does this a lot but he does it especially in the true story where he talks about how um yeah i make a lot of these illusions but i don't need to tell you because you know what they are basically the easter eggs of the second century um i imagine like it would it would be like a marvel movie or like a episode of south park for somebody back then like you know it would be all these things would be like in your face in terms of how um common they were but now it's frustrating because i'm like oh i want i want the whole picture i'm sure there's lots of stuff we're not getting because we just don't have have that available to us but like uh yeah yeah lucian in a sense is like a an era staphonese for me like he's like um i'm not getting the whole picture but i could just imagine how brilliant people during his time would have seen well i think we should not rule out the possibility as well you know in generating that air of expectation at the beginning i think we probably shouldn't rule out the possibility that he might be priming us to i mean exactly that feeling of i'm sure there are things that i'm not getting um you know this is this is a work after all that ends the end of book two it ends with the promise of more to come in the following books that never materialize and the one thing that we know about lucian or the one external thing that we hear about him from a contemporary is that he apparently wrote a fake um what was it um a fake treatise heraclitian treatise i think is an extraordinarily difficult philosopher and he faked or forged a treatise of heracles heraclitus and um and it duped it it it took people in and you know so he's someone who likes to play on um on people's knowledge and you know so it could well be the case that there are cases in the true stories where we suspect that he's playing with a source and we think to ourselves um and we don't have that anymore but maybe he's not you know so he might be priming us to expect illusions where sometimes there aren't and there isn't any underlying text i wouldn't surprise me if that game is being played as well yeah absolutely i think we were talking um beforehand about how i can just imagine lucian like the type of guy who's he's writing um and he's like just like hunched over writing on his wax tablet or whatever and then he just looks out of the corner of his eye like he knows like he's he's getting one over on you know people thousands of years absolutely absolutely um so i have one more question for you if you have time and this is a more general question um but i think we touched upon it a lot here just in terms of lucian's uh relationship to things like hypertextuality and hyperreality and postmodernism right even if it's not in the sense that we understand it in the post 1940s sense um why should we read lucian nowadays when we have echo or we have tarantino movies you know what do we get out of studying lucian uh well what do we get out of studying lucian i mean i can think of you know things that i i should say like well the information technology or the information culture point is is an obvious one that um you know we're living in the age of too much information or information overload the internet and all the rest of it and so someone fake news and all of that and and someone like lucian is very attuned to that and it's kind of interesting he gives us an opportunity to contemplate that culture in a world that's very far removed from us you know 2000 years ago um so maybe in what ways was it different in what ways was it similar um and i think we can find a lot there's a lot in his works that feels familiar um and so i think he's worth reading for that reason um it's also interesting to see that you know echo and to find resonances with artists whom we think of as extremely modern um i don't know andy warhol and quentin tarantino you know but in a way that this is they have counterparts in a very different world but i also think it's such fun i mean he really is there aren't many authors that i find funny um humor is a very difficult thing across cultures and times but lucian is genuinely funny and interesting and um and for anyone looking to learn greek his greek is beautiful it's just it's very accessible and just very simple i mean it's deceptively so but um i think kepler used lucian to learn greek without tears and i think the harry potter translation into ancient greek was modeled on lucian style so um he's just he's full of wonders and he's someone he's an author who he really just makes you think in interesting ways about the world that you live in because the world you live in is in many ways very different to where the world he lived in i mean you know very very remote it's a very strange other alien world and yes that alien planet of the past is so there are so many resonances so he makes you think yeah he makes me think anyway no absolutely lucian is hysterical even in translation um my greek is not great at all um i've been neglecting ever too late to start to start or take it up again yeah yeah i am but i do have a copy of uh it's like a version of uh true stories that's like yeah yeah that um i've not cracked yet but i attend to um so dr novelli this has been amazing this has been a an honor um love that i got to talk lucian with life wise it's been really fun i really enjoy yeah absolutely it's it's it's always fun to talk about lucian no matter what yeah can you ever have enough exactly that's exactly why you should read them you see there you go that's that's something that beautifully jason absolutely so i brought up um one of your books uh probably the one most prescient to what we're talking about today uh reading fiction with lucian fakes freaks and hyper reality um this is a fantastic book i cannot recommend it enough monograph has seven chapters um doesn't just touch upon lucian it touches upon greek novels like um karen said it also touches upon um um barito echo she does a lot of comparisons between the two um and uh pick it up uh can't recommend it enough um she also has another book about uh the moon and greek and roman thought um that came out not too long ago i have to read that one unfortunately i will get it eventually um but i'm gonna send you a copy um is there anything you want to plug before we go anything any final words no i think i think what i'm gonna be thinking about or what i'm thinking of very much at the moment is is lucian science lucian scientific thought um i'm beginning to i've been cooking in my mind for a while but yeah i want to explore it i want to get into fast so so that's great some some articles and some books coming up on that yeah i hope so yeah well karen thank you so much this like i said this has been an honor um you uh thank you dandle augdon and peter thoneman for recommending karen oh thank you guys hello so uh thank you so much and as always lovely to me yes love you love you lovely to talk and to meet you hopefully we can speak again when you have time absolutely absolutely a pleasure and everybody in the audience thank you so much for the supports um i'm just gonna be honest it's been some um hard times but uh we all get through those and uh the fact that you guys care so much about this little endeavor and the scholars who contributed to this show have been so supportive that um i had to come back so um you're stuck with me for the time being definitely do come back this is a great thing you're doing jason thank you and next next friday we will have dandle augdon back to discuss the werewolf and um antiquity so um dust off that satiricon and uh get ready to roll rock and roll and until next time we will see you um and thank you again dr nevalli have a good thank you so much have a lovely evening bye bye


If you randomly select a group of women and ultrasound their uterus, the majority of them have fibroid tumors by age 50, and by most I mean more than 80% of black women and about nearly 70% of white women. Half of white women already have fibroids by their early 40s, and the same could be said for African American women in their mid-30s. After getting over the shock of how widespread fibroids are, the next question becomes, why the racial disparity? Is it diet, stress, environmental exposures? Maybe whatever it is could offer a clue as to what causes fibroids. For example, African Americans tend to have a lower intake of fruits and vegetables, and fruits and vegetables appear protective against fibroids, particularly citrus, here in the Black Women's Health study, though not apparently just citrus juice. It's interesting. If you measure the levels of beta-carotene in fresh surgical tissue samples of uterine fibroids and adjacent normal uterus tissue obtained during hysterectomies, you find significantly lower concentrations in the fibroids. In fact, beta-carotene was not even detectable in half the fibroid specimens. The same thing is actually found in cancer. Most cancerous tissues tested had undetectable levels of beta-carotene compared to the normal tissue right next to the tumor. So maybe decreased levels of beta-carotene somehow plays a role in causing these conditions? Sounds like a bit of a stretch, but you don't know until you put it to the test. But there have never been a randomized controlled clinical trial of fruits and vegetables for fibroids until never. They did do a randomized controlled trial of a kind of a fruit and vegetable at the same time, tomatoes, but for the prevention of fibroids in Japanese quail. Most of my patients are not Japanese, nor quail. The action of lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes in an animal model may not accurately represent lycopene action in humans. And indeed, the Harvard Nurses study found no apparent link between lycopene consumption and fibroids. So yeah, fruits and at least green vegetables may have a protective effect, but we won't know for sure until they're properly put to the test. Vitamin D is another possibility as to why African Americans disproportionately suffer from fibroids. Women with darker skin are more likely to be vitamin D deficient, as many as 80% of black women may have inadequate levels of vitamin D, compared to only one in five white women. Vitamin D does inhibit fibroid cell proliferation in a petri dish. It may be able to shrink tumors in your pet rat, but what about people? A population study did find that women with sufficient vitamin D levels in their blood had about a third lower odds of fibroids, consistent with the finding that women who report lots of sun exposure also appear to be protected, but until there's an interventional trial where women are randomized to vitamin D or placebo, we won't know for sure if vitamin D plays a role in fibroid prevention or treatment or not. African American women are also more likely to sprinkle baby powder on their genitals, which may not only double the odds of fibroids, but may increase the risk of ovarian cancer, the deadliest gynecological cancer. Internal memos show Johnson & Johnson knew about the cancer risk, but still decided to target African Americans. Think of us, Johnson & Johnson said, as a lifetime friend of the family, a lifetime cut short, perhaps, by its baby powder, or at least so said a jury, which recently awarded a family $110 million in damages on top of the $200 million in verdicts from last year, with thousands of lawsuits pending after internal memos revealed that decades ago their own contracted toxicologists were warning the company that there are multiple studies showing a cancer link, and anyone who denies this risk will be perceived by the public in the same light as those who denied a link between smoking cigarettes and cancer, denying the obvious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.