From the mid-nineteenth century, it became de rigueur for Classics Departments to acquire casts of Greek and Roman sculpture to form reference and experimental collections. Recent scholarship has revived such casts, investigating their role as instruments of teaching and research, and their wavering popularity. This paper further examines the aims of those responsible for collecting casts, and discusses how these objectives influenced their materiality and treatment, as well as showing how the de facto creation of a new canon of casts through their repetition across the collections of different institutions contributed to the decline in their perceived importance.

Lucian's singular role within the socio-cultural context of the period known as the Second Sophistic has found increasing appreciation amongst scholars, particularly over the last fifteen years. Although not a sophist in the true sense, Lucian can be regarded as an outstanding pepaideumenos, meaning this: during an era in which being Greek was less a matter of political than of cultural definition, and in which membership in the upper administrative echelons was dependent on academic qualifications, on the mastery, that is, of a code which consisted of broad general knowledge and rhetorical activity partnered by thorough conversancy with the literary heritage and language of Attic Greece – during this age, then, Lucian proved himself not only a worthy representative of such paideia, but also contributed with his literary works to its development and adaptation.