Abstract

A short episode in Lucian's True Histories describes Lychnopolis, the City of Lamps, where animated household lamps congregate in an orderly society. This article argues that these lamps symbolize household slaves, and that their society innovates on a long tradition of animated and personified lamps in Greek literature to expose and confirm the hazards and uncertainties regarding the presence, knowledge, and rational thinking of slaves. The astonishing order of the city invalidates a commonplace of slaveholder ideology, that slaves lacked the rational capability to govern their own lives.