Narcissistic Fraud in the Ancient World: Lucian's Account of Alexander of Abonuteichos and the Cult of Glycon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based upon Lucian of Samosata's account of Alexander of Abonuteichos, who is the founder of the Glycon cult in second century Asia Minor, I argue that Alexander likely is a malignant narcissist. I construct this argument by summarizing Alexander's behaviours, and then showing how those behaviours seemingly relate to modern psychiatric descriptions of narcissists. As such, Alexander's behaviours have parallels with several modern cult leaders. Moreover, Alexander's attempts to kill his critics suggests that he is a particular type of narcissist-a malignant narcissist-making him a dangerous and vengeful personality. Stephen A. Kent, PhD, is a Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies, University of Alberta (Canada), specializing in the study of ‘cults' and alternative religions. He has published articles in numerous sociology and religious studies journals on a variety of topics, including Valentinian Gnosticism, ancient Hindu philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism, Puritanism, Quakerism, fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, and new religions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".