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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".