The Humed Serpent: Lucian, miracles, enlightenment, and empire

Abstract

In his essay ‘Of Miracles’, published separately and as the final chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume enlists Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet as evidence for his claim that miracle narratives first take root among gullible rural populations before spreading to cultured city-dwelling elites. This essay reads Lucian’s Alexander and On the Death of Peregrinus against the Humean grain to suggest that miracle stories emerge as a consequence of the forms of commerce and circulation enabled by empires. In light of this, I recharacterize Hume’s geography of gullibility as an aspirational but unsustainable ideal engendered by the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’.