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This course explores the role of fiction in the presentation of personal identity among the intellectual elite of the Roman Empire. Intellectuals in the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ told stories which are ridiculous, bizarre, and clearly fictional. Some pretend to have visited utopias in the wilderness, of having seen scientific and medical marvels, and of communing with other dead intellectuals. This class focuses on stories of the unbelievable, paradoxical, and fake but which are written as first hand accounts by real historical intellectuals of the Roman Empire. The class will be broken down into providing background as to what a Greek intellectual or ‘sophist’ was exactly, what demands were placed on intellectuals to make up stories, such as in the performance of declamation, and how even from the early days of Greek history the boundaries between truth and fiction were at issue. After providing context to characters and settings of the Roman Empire’s intellectual culture, we examine the voices of people, including physicians like Galen, who used the fictional motifs of utopias, adventures, romance, ghosts stories among others to construct their identities. These fictional elements often were the means by which issues of ethnicity, power, gender, and tradition were hashed out. All sources are provided in English and no experience or background in Classics is required to participate in the course.