Lucian

Lucian of Samosata[a] (c. 125 – after

180) was an Assyrian[1] satirist and
rhetorician[2] who is best known for his
characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with
which he frequently ridiculed
superstition, religious practices, and
belief in the paranormal. Although his
native language was probably Syriac, all
of his extant works are written entirely in
Ancient Greek (mostly in the Attic Greek
popular during the Second Sophistic
period).
 Lucian

Title page of a 1619 Latin translation of

Lucian's complete works
Born c. 125 AD
Samosata, Roman
Empire (now Turkey)
Died After 180 AD
probably Egypt,
Roman Empire
Occupation Novelist, satirist,
rhetorician
Notable works A True History,
Dialogues of the
 Dead,
Lover of Lies,
Dialogues of the
Gods,
Dialogues of the
Courtesans,
Alexander the False
Prophet,
Philosophies for
l

Everything that is known about Lucian's

life comes from his own writings, which
are often difficult to interpret because of
his extensive use of sarcasm. According
to his oration The Dream, he was the son
of a lower middle class family from the
village of Samosata along the banks of
the Euphrates in the remote Roman
province of Syria. As a young man, he
was apprenticed to his uncle to become
a sculptor, but, after a failed attempt at
sculpting, he ran away to pursue an
education in Ionia. He may have become
a travelling lecturer and visited
universities throughout the Roman
Empire. After acquiring fame and wealth
through his teaching, Lucian finally
settled down in Athens for a decade,
during which he wrote most of his extant
works. In his fifties, he may have been
appointed as a highly paid government
official in Egypt, after which point he
disappears from the historical record.

Lucian's works were wildly popular in

antiquity, and more than eighty writings
attributed to him have survived to the
present day, a considerably higher
quantity than for most other classical
writers. His most famous work is A True
Story, a tongue-in-cheek satire against
authors who tell incredible tales, which is
regarded by some as the earliest known
work of science fiction. Lucian invented
the genre of the comic dialogue, a parody
of the traditional Socratic dialogue. His
dialogue Lover of Lies makes fun of
people who believe in the supernatural
and contains the oldest known version of
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Lucian wrote
numerous satires making fun of
traditional stories about the gods
including The Dialogues of the Gods,
Icaromenippus, Zeus Rants, Zeus
Catechized, and The Parliament of the
Gods. His Dialogues of the Dead focuses
on the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and
Menippus. Philosophies for Sale and The
Banquet or Lapiths make fun of various
philosophical schools, and The
Fisherman or the Dead Come to Life is a
defense of this mockery.

Lucian often ridiculed public figures, such

as the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus
Proteus in his letter The Passing of
Peregrinus and the fraudulent oracle
Alexander of Abonoteichus in his treatise
Alexander the False Prophet. Lucian's
treatise On the Syrian Goddess satirizes
cultural distinctions between Greeks and
Syrians and is the main source of
information about the cult of Atargatis.

Lucian had an enormous, wide-ranging

impact on Western literature. Works
inspired by his writings include Thomas
More's Utopia, the works of François
Rabelais, William Shakespeare's Timon of
Athens and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels.

Life

Biographical sources …

Lucian is not mentioned in any

contemporary texts or inscriptions
written by others[3] and he is not included
in Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists.[3]
As a result of this, everything that is
known about Lucian comes exclusively
from his own writings.[4][5][3] A variety of
characters with names very similar to
Lucian, including "Lukinos," "Lukianos,"
"Lucius," and "The Syrian" appear
throughout Lucian's writings.[3] These
have been frequently interpreted by
scholars and biographers as "masks",
"alter-egos", or "mouthpieces" of the
author.[3] Daniel S. Richter criticizes the
frequent tendency to interpret such
"Lucian-like figures" as self-inserts by the
author[3] and argues that they are, in fact,
merely fictional characters Lucian uses
to "think with" when satirizing
conventional distinctions between
Greeks and Syrians.[3] He suggests that
they are primarily a literary trope used by
Lucian to deflect accusations that he as
the Syrian author "has somehow
outraged the purity of Greek idiom or
genre" through his invention of the comic
dialogue.[6] British classicist Donald
Russell states, "A good deal of what
Lucian says about himself is no more to
be trusted than the voyage to the moon
that he recounts so persuasively in the
first person in True Stories"[7] and warns
that "it is foolish to treat [the information
he gives about himself in his writings] as
autobiography."[7]
Background and upbringing …

Abonoteichos

Smyrna
Ephesus Samosata
Hierapolis
Antioch

Map of Anatolia showing locations associated with

Lucian

Lucian was born in the town of Samosata

on the banks of the Euphrates on the far
eastern outskirts of the Roman
Empire.[8][5][9][10] Samosata had been the
capital of the Kingdom of Commagene
until 72 AD when it was annexed by
Vespasian and became part of the
Roman province of Syria.[11][10] The
population of the town was mostly
Syrian[8] and Lucian's native tongue was
probably Syriac, a form of Middle
Aramaic.[8][12][13][10]

During the time when Lucian lived,

traditional Greco-Roman religion was in
decline and its role in society had
become largely ceremonial.[14] As a
substitute for traditional religion, many
people in the Hellenistic world joined
mystery cults, such as the Mysteries of
Isis, Mithraism, the cult of Cybele, and
the Eleusinian Mysteries.[15] Superstition
had always been common throughout
ancient society,[15] but it was especially
prevalent during the second
century.[15][16] Most educated people of
Lucian's time adhered to one of the
various Hellenistic philosophies,[15] of
which the major ones were Stoicism,
Platonism, Peripateticism, Pyrrhonism,
and Epicureanism.[15] Every major town
had its own university[15] and these
universities often employed professional
travelling lecturers,[15] who were
frequently paid high sums of money to
lecture about various philosophical
teachings.[17] The most prestigious
center of learning was the city of Athens
in Greece, which had a long intellectual
history.[17]
According to Lucian's oration The Dream,
which classical scholar Lionel Casson
states he probably delivered as an
address upon returning to Samosata at
the age of thirty-five or forty after
establishing his reputation as a great
orator,[4] Lucian's parents were lower
middle class and his uncles owned a
local statue-making shop.[8] Lucian's
parents could not afford to give him a
higher education,[4] so, after he
completed his elementary schooling,
Lucian's uncle took him on as an
apprentice and began teaching him how
to sculpt.[4] Lucian, however, soon proved
to be poor at sculpting and ruined the
statue he had been working on.[4] His
uncle beat him, causing him to run off.[4]
Lucian fell asleep and experienced a
dream in which he was being fought over
by the personifications of Statuary and of
Culture.[4][18] He decided to listen to
Culture and thus sought out an
education.[4][19]

Although The Dream has long been

treated by scholars as a truthful
autobiography of Lucian,[4][20] its
historical accuracy is questionable at
best.[21][20][7] Classicist Simon Swain
calls it "a fine but rather apocryphal
version of Lucian's education"[21] and
Karin Schlapbach calls it "ironical".[18]
Richter argues that it is not
autobiographical at all, but rather a
prolalia [προλᾰλιά], or playful literary
work, and a "complicated meditation on a
young man's acquisition of paideia" [i.e.
education].[20] Russell dismisses The
Dream as entirely fictional, noting, "We
recall that Socrates too started as
sculptor, and Ovid's vision of Elegy and
Tragedy (Amores 3.1) is all too similar to
Lucian's."[7]

Education and career …

Speculative portrayal of Lucian taken from a
seventeenth-century engraving by William Faithorne

In Lucian's Double Indictment, the

personification of Rhetoric delivers a
speech in which she describes the
unnamed defendant, who is described as
a "Syrian" author of transgressive
dialogues, at the time she found him, as
a young man wandering in Ionia in
Anatolia "with no idea what he ought to
do with himself."[22][8][12] She describes
"the Syrian" at this stage in his career as
"still speaking in a barbarous manner and
all but wearing a caftan [kandys] in the
Assyrian fashion".[12][22] Rhetoric states
that she "took him in hand and... gave
him paideia."[12][22]

Scholars have long interpreted the

"Syrian" in this work as Lucian
himself[12][8] and taken this speech to
mean that Lucian ran away to Ionia,
where he pursued his education.[8]
Richter, however, argues that the "Syrian"
is not Lucian himself, but rather a literary
device Lucian uses to subvert literary and
ethnic norms.[23]
Ionia was the center of rhetorical learning
at the time[8] The most prestigious
universities of rhetoric were in Ephesus
and Smyrna,[8] but it is unlikely that
Lucian could have afforded to pay the
tuition at either of these schools.[8] It is
not known how Lucian obtained his
education,[8] but somehow he managed
to acquire an extensive knowledge of
rhetoric as well as classical literature and
philosophy.[8][12]

Lucian mentions in his dialogue The

Fisherman that he had initially attempted
to apply his knowledge of rhetoric and
become a lawyer,[24] but that he had
become disillusioned by the
deceitfulness of the trade and resolved
to become a philosopher instead.[25]
Lucian travelled across the Empire,
lecturing throughout Greece, Italy, and
Gaul.[26] In Gaul, Lucian may have held a
position as a highly paid government
professor.[27]

In around 160, Lucian returned to Ionia as

a wealthy celebrity.[27] He visited
Samosata[27] and stayed in the east for
several years.[27] He is recorded as
having been in Antioch in either 162 or
163.[27][5] In around 165, he bought a
house in Athens and invited his parents
to come live with him in the city.[27]
Lucian must have married at some point
during his travels, because in one of his
writings he mentions having a son at this
point.[27]

Lucian lived in Athens for around a

decade, during which time he gave up
lecturing and instead devoted his
attention to writing.[27] It was during this
decade that Lucian composed nearly all
his most famous works.[27] Lucian wrote
exclusively in Greek,[9][28][13] mainly in the
Attic Greek popular during the Second
Sophistic, but On the Syrian Goddess,
which is attributed to Lucian, is written in
a highly successful imitation of
Herodotus' Ionic Greek, leading some
scholars to believe that Lucian may not
be the real author.[28]

For unknown reasons, Lucian stopped

writing around 175 and began travelling
and lecturing again.[27] During the reign
of Emperor Commodus (180–92), the
aging Lucian may have been appointed
to a lucrative government position in
Egypt.[27][5][13] After this point, he
disappears from the historical record
entirely,[27] and nothing is known about
his death.[27]

Views
Bust of Epicurus, an Athenian philosopher whom

Lucian greatly admired[29][30]

Lucian's philosophical views are difficult

to categorize due to his persistent use of
irony and sarcasm.[31] In The Fisherman,
Lucian describes himself as a champion
of philosophy[31] and throughout his
other writings he characterizes
philosophy as a morally constructive
discipline,[31] but he is critical of pseudo-
philosophers, whom he portrays as
greedy, bad-tempered, sexually immoral
hypocrites.[32][33] Lucian was not known
to be a member of any of the major
philosophical schools.[34][32] In his
Philosophies for Sale, he makes fun of
members of every school.[31][35] Lucian
was critical of Stoicism and Platonism,
because he regarded them as
encouraging of superstition.[30] His
Nigrinus superficially appears to be a
"eulogy of Platonism",[30] but may, in fact,
be satirical, or merely an excuse to
ridicule Roman society.[30]

Nonetheless, at other times, Lucian

writes approvingly of individual
philosophies.[31] According to Turner,
although Lucian makes fun of Skeptic
philosophers,[30] he displays a
temperamental inclination towards that
philosophy.[30] Edwyn Bevan identifies
Lucian as a Skeptic, [36] and in his
Hermotimus, Lucian rejects all
philosophical systems as contradictory
and concludes that life is too short to
determine which of them comes nearest
to the truth, so the best solution is to rely
on common sense,[31] which was what
the Pyrrhonian Skeptics advocated. The
maxim that "Eyes are better witnesses
than ears" is echoed repeatedly
throughout several of Lucian's
dialogues.[37]
Lucian was skeptical of oracles,[38]
though he was by no means the only
person of his time to voice such
skepticism.[38] Lucian rejected belief in
the paranormal, regarding it as
superstition.[37][10] In his dialogue The
Lover of Lies, he probably voices some of
his own opinions through his character
Tychiades,[37][b] perhaps including the
declaration by Tychiades that he does
not believe in daemones, phantoms, or
ghosts because he has never seen such
things.[37] Tychiades, however, still
professes belief in the gods' existence:

Dinomachus: 'In other words, you do

not believe in the existence of the
 Gods, since you maintain that cures
cannot be wrought by the use of holy
names?'
Tychiades: 'Nay, say not so, my dear
Dinomachus,' I answered; 'the Gods
may exist, and these things may yet be
lies. I respect the Gods: I see the cures
performed by them, I see their
beneficence at work in restoring the
sick through the medium of the
medical faculty and their drugs.
Asclepius, and his sons after him,
compounded soothing medicines and
healed the sick, – without the lion's-
skin-and-field-mouse process.'[41]

According to Everett Ferguson, Lucian

was strongly influenced by the Cynics.[42]
The Dream or the Cock, Timon the
Misanthrope, Charon or Inspectors, and
The Downward Journey or the Tyrant all
display Cynic themes.[42] Lucian was
particularly indebted to Menippus, a
Cynic philosopher and satirist of the third
century BC.[42][43] Lucian wrote an
admiring biography of the philosopher
Demonax, who was a philosophical
eclectic, but whose ideology most
closely resembled Cynicism.[42]
Demonax's main divergence from the
Cynics was that he did not disapprove of
ordinary life.[42] Paul Turner observes that
Lucian's Cynicus reads as a
straightforward defense of Cynicism,[30]
but also remarks that Lucian savagely
ridicules the Cynic philosopher
Peregrinus in his Passing of
Peregrinus.[30]

Lucian also greatly admired

Epicurus,[29][31] whom he describes in
Alexander the False Prophet as "truly holy
and prophetic".[29] Later, in the same
dialogue, he praises a book written by
Epicurus:

What blessings that book

creates for its readers and
what peace, tranquillity, and
freedom it engenders in them,
liberating them as it does from
terrors and apparitions and
 portents, from vain hopes and
extravagant cravings,
developing in them intelligence
and truth, and truly purifying
their understanding, not with
torches and squills [i. e. sea
onions] and that sort of foolery,
but with straight thinking,
truthfulness and frankness.[44]

Lucian had a generally negative opinion

of Herodotus and his historiography,
which he viewed as faulty.[45][46]

Works
Over eighty works attributed to Lucian
have survived.[47][48][5][7] These works
belong to a diverse variety of styles and
genres,[47][49][50] and include comic
dialogues, rhetorical essays, and prose
fiction.[47][49] Lucian's writings were
targeted towards a highly educated,
upper-class Greek audience[51] and make
almost constant allusions to Greek
cultural history,[51] leading the classical
scholar R. Bracht Branham to label
Lucian's highly sophisticated style "the
comedy of tradition".[51] By the time
Lucian's writings were rediscovered
during the Renaissance, most of the
works of literature referenced in them
had been lost or forgotten,[51] making it
difficult for readers of later periods to
understand his works.[51]

A True Story …

Illustration from 1894 by William Strang depicting a

battle scene from Book One of Lucian's novel A True
Story

Lucian was one of the earliest novelists

in Western civilization. In A True Story
(Ἀληθῶν Διηγημάτων), a fictional
narrative work written in prose, he
parodies some of the fantastic tales told
by Homer in the Odyssey and also the
not-so-fantastic tales from the historian
Thucydides.[52][53] He anticipated modern
science fiction themes including voyages
to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial
life, interplanetary warfare, and artificial
life, nearly two millennia before Jules
Verne and H. G. Wells. The novel is often
regarded as the earliest known work of
science fiction.[54][55][56][57][58][59]

The novel begins with an explanation

that the story is not at all "true" and that
everything in it is, in fact, a complete and
utter lie.[60][61] The narrative begins with
Lucian and his fellow travelers journeying
out past the Pillars of Heracles.[62][63]
Blown off course by a storm, they come
to an island with a river of wine filled with
fish and bears, a marker indicating that
Heracles and Dionysus have traveled to
this point, and trees that look like
women.[64][63] Shortly after leaving the
island, they are caught up by a whirlwind
and taken to the Moon,[65][63] where they
find themselves embroiled in a full-scale
war between the king of the Moon and
the king of the Sun over colonization of
the Morning Star.[66][63] Both armies
include bizarre hybrid lifeforms.[67][63]
The armies of the Sun win the war by
clouding over the Moon and blocking out
the Sun's light.[68][63] Both parties then
come to a peace agreement.[69] Lucian
then describes life on the Moon and how
it is different from life on Earth.[70][63]

After returning to Earth, the adventurers

are swallowed by a 200-mile-long
whale,[71][72] in whose belly they discover
a variety of fish people, whom they wage
war against and triumph over.[73][72] They
kill the whale by starting a bonfire and
escape by propping its mouth open.[74][72]
Next, they encounter a sea of milk, an
island of cheese, and the Island of the
Blessed.[75][76] There, Lucian meets the
heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical
men and animals, as well as Homer and
Pythagoras.[77][78] They find sinners being
punished, the worst of them being the
ones who had written books with lies and
fantasies, including Herodotus and
Ctesias.[79][78] After leaving the Island of
the Blessed, they deliver a letter to
Calypso given to them by Odysseus
explaining that he wishes he had stayed
with her so he could have lived
eternally.[80][78] They then discover a
chasm in the Ocean, but eventually sail
around it, discover a far-off continent and
decide to explore it.[81][78] The book ends
abruptly with Lucian stating that their
future adventures will be described in the
upcoming sequels,[82][83] a promise which
a disappointed scholiast described as
"the biggest lie of all".[84]

Satirical dialogues …

In his Double Indictment, Lucian declares

that his proudest literary achievement is
the invention of the "satirical
dialogue",[85] which was modeled on the
earlier Platonic dialogue, but was
comedic in tone rather than
philosophical.[85] The prolaliai to his
Dialogues of the Courtesans suggests
that Lucian acted out his dialogues
himself as part of a comedic routine.[86]
Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead (Νεκρικοὶ
Διάλογοι) is a satirical work centering
around the Cynic philosophers Diogenes
of Sinope and his pupil Menippus, who
lived modestly while they were alive and
are now living comfortably in the
abysmal conditions of the Underworld,
while those who had lived lives of luxury
are in torment when faced by the same
conditions.[87] The dialogue draws on
earlier literary precursors, including the
nekyia in Book XI of Homer's Odyssey,[88]
but also adds new elements not found in
them.[89] Homer's nekyia describes
transgressors against the gods being
punished for their sins, but Lucian
embellished this idea by having cruel and
greedy persons also be punished.[89]
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is a major
recurring character throughout many of Lucian's
dialogues.[90]

In his dialogue The Lover of Lies

(Φιλοψευδὴς), Lucian satirizes belief in
the supernatural and paranormal[91]
through a framing story in which the
main narrator, a skeptic named
Tychiades, goes to visit an elderly friend
named Eukrates.[92] At Eukrates's house,
he encounters a large group of guests
who have recently gathered together due
to Eukrates suddenly falling ill.[92] The
other guests offer Eukrates a variety of
folk remedies to help him recover.[92]
When Tychiades objects that such
remedies do not work, the others all
laugh at him[92] and try to persuade him
to believe in the supernatural by telling
him stories, which grow increasingly
ridiculous as the conversation
progresses.[92] One of the last stories
they tell is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice",
which the German playwright Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe later adapted into a
famous ballad.[93][94]
Lucian frequently made fun of
philosophers[42] and no school was
spared from his mockery.[42] In the
dialogue Philosophies for Sale, Lucian
creates an imaginary slave market in
which Zeus puts famous philosophers up
for sale, including Pythagoras, Diogenes,
Heraclitus, Socrates, Chrysippus, and
Pyrrho,[95] each of whom attempts to
persuade the customers to buy his
philosophy.[95] In The Banquet, or Lapiths,
Lucian points out the hypocrisies of
representatives from all the major
philosophical schools.[42] In The
Fisherman, or the Dead Come to Life,
Lucian defends his other dialogues by
comparing the venerable philosophers of
ancient times with their unworthy
contemporary followers.[42] Lucian was
often particularly critical of people who
pretended to be philosophers when they
really were not[42] and his dialogue The
Runaways portrays an imposter Cynic as
the antithesis of true philosophy.[42] His
Symposium is a parody of Plato's
Symposium in which, instead of
discussing the nature of love, the
philosophers get drunk, tell smutty tales,
argue relentlessly over whose school is
the best, and eventually break out into a
full-scale brawl.[96] In Icaromenippus, the
Cynic philosopher Menippus fashions a
set of wings for himself in imitation of
the mythical Icarus and flies to
Heaven,[97] where he receives a guided
tour from Zeus himself.[98] The dialogue
ends with Zeus announcing his decision
to destroy all philosophers, since all they
do is bicker, though he agrees to grant
them a temporary reprieve until spring.[99]
Nektyomanteia is a dialogue written in
parallel to Icaromenippus in which, rather
than flying to Heaven, Menippus
descends to the underworld to consult
the prophet Tiresias.[100]

Lucian wrote numerous dialogues

making fun of traditional Greek stories
about the gods.[42][101] His Dialogues of
the Gods (Θεῶν Διάλογοι) consists of
numerous short vignettes parodying a
variety of the scenes from Greek
mythology.[102] The dialogues portray the
gods as comically weak and prone to all
the foibles of human emotion.[101][42]
Zeus in particular is shown to be a
"feckless ruler" and a serial adulterer.[103]
Lucian also wrote several other works in
a similar vein, including Zeus Catechized,
Zeus Rants, and The Parliament of the
Gods.[42] Throughout all his dialogues,
Lucian displays a particular fascination
with Hermes, the messenger of the
gods,[90] who frequently appears as a
major character in the role of an
intermediary who travels between
worlds.[90] The Dialogues of the
Courtesans is a collection of short
dialogues involving various
courtesans.[104][105] This collection is
unique as one of the only surviving works
of Greek literature to mention female
homosexuality.[106] It is also unusual for
mixing Lucian's characters from other
dialogues with stock characters from
New Comedy;[107] over half of the men
mentioned in Dialogues of the
Courtesans are also mentioned in
Lucian's other dialogues,[107] but almost
all of the courtesans themselves are
characters borrowed from the plays of
Menander and other comedic
playwrights.[107]

Treatises and letters …

 Statue of the Nabataean carving
snake-god from c. 100 AD
Glycon, depicting the goddess
invented by the Atargatis, the subject
oraclemonger of Lucian's treatise On
Alexander of the Syrian Goddess[45]
Abonoteichus,
whom Lucian
satirizes in his
treatise
Alexander the
False
Prophet[16]
Lucian's treatise Alexander the False
Prophet describes the rise of Alexander
of Abonoteichus, a charlatan who
claimed to be the prophet of the serpent-
god Glycon.[16] Though the account is
satirical in tone,[108] it seems to be a
largely accurate report of the Glycon
cult[108] and many of Lucian's statements
about the cult have been confirmed
through archaeological evidence,
including coins, statues, and
inscriptions.[108] Lucian describes his
own meeting with Alexander in which he
posed as a friendly philosopher,[108] but,
when Alexander invited him to kiss his
hand, Lucian bit it instead.[108] Lucian
reports that, aside from himself, the only
others who dared challenge Alexander's
reputation as a true prophet were the
Epicureans (whom he lauds as heroes)
and the Christians.[108]

Lucian's treatise On the Syrian Goddess is

a detailed description of the cult of the
Syrian goddess Atargatis at Hierapolis
(now Manbij).[45] It is written in a faux-
Ionic Greek and imitates the
ethnographic methodology of the Greek
historian Herodotus,[45] which Lucian
elsewhere derides as faulty.[45] For
generations, many scholars doubted the
authenticity of On the Syrian Goddess
because it seemed too genuinely
reverent to have really been written by
Lucian.[109] More recently, scholars have
come to recognize the book as satirical
and have restored its Lucianic
authorship.[109]

In the treatise, Lucian satirizes the

arbitrary cultural distinctions between
"Greeks" and "Assyrians" by emphasizing
the manner in which Syrians have
adopted Greek customs and thereby
effectively become "Greeks"
themselves.[110] The anonymous narrator
of the treatise initially seems to be a
Greek Sophist,[111] but, as the treatise
progresses, he reveals himself to actually
be a native Syrian.[112] Scholars dispute
whether the treatise is an accurate
description of Syrian cultural practices
because very little is known about
Hierapolis other than what is recorded in
On the Syrian Goddess itself.[45] Coins
minted in the late fourth century BCE,
municipal decrees from Seleucid rulers,
and a late Hellenistic relief carving have
confirmed Lucian's statement that the
city's original name was Manbog and that
the city was closely associated with the
cults of Atargatis and Hadad.[45] A
Jewish rabbi later listed the temple at
Hierapolis as one of the five most
important pagan temples in the Near
East.[113]
Macrobii ("Long-Livers") is an essay
about famous philosophers who lived for
many years.[114] It describes how long
each of them lived, and gives an account
of each of their deaths.[114] In his
treatises Teacher of Rhetoric and On
Salaried Posts, Lucian criticizes the
teachings of master rhetoricians.[18] His
treatise On Dancing is a major source of
information about Greco-Roman
dance.[115] In it, he describes dance as an
act of mimesis ("imitation")[116] and
rationalizes the myth of Proteus as being
nothing more than an account of a highly
skilled Egyptian dancer.[115] He also
wrote about visual arts in Portraits and
On Behalf of Portraits.[18] Lucian's
biography of the philosopher Demonax
eulogizes him as a great philosopher[42]
and portrays him as a hero of parrhesia
("boldness of speech").[42] In his treatise,
How to Write History, Lucian criticizes the
historical methodology used by writers
such as Herodotus and Ctesias,[117] who
wrote vivid and self-indulgent
descriptions of events they had never
actually seen.[117] Instead, Lucian argues
that the historian never embellish his
stories and should place his commitment
to accuracy above his desire to entertain
his audience.[118] He also argues the
historian should remain absolutely
impartial and tell the events as they really
happened, even if they are likely to cause
disapproval.[118] Lucian names
Thucydides as a specific example of a
historian who models these virtues.[118]

In his satirical letter Passing of

Peregrinus (Περὶ τῆς Περεγρίνου
Τελευτῆς), Lucian describes the death of
the controversial Cynic philosopher
Peregrinus Proteus,[48] who had publicly
immolated himself on a pyre at the
Olympic Games of 165.[48] The letter is
historically significant because it
preserves one of the earliest pagan
evaluations of Christianity.[119] In the
letter, one of Lucian's characters delivers
a speech ridiculing Christians for their
perceived credulity and ignorance,[120]
but he also affords them some level of
respect on account of their morality.[120]
The speaker in the letter also refers to an
individual whom he calls "Christ", whom
he characterizes as the founder of
Christianity. The speaker claims that this
"Christ" lived in Palestine just over a
century prior, that he taught that his
followers would attain immortality, and
that he was crucified.[120]

In the letter Against the Ignorant Book

Collector, Lucian ridicules the common
practice whereby Near Easterners collect
massive libraries of Greek texts for the
sake of appearing "cultured", but without
actually reading any of them.[121][122]
Pseudo-Lucian …

Some of the writings attributed to Lucian,

such as the Amores and the Ass, are
usually not considered genuine works of
Lucian and are normally cited under the
name of "Pseudo-Lucian".[123][124] The
Ass (Λούκιος ἢ ῎Oνος) is probably a
summarized version of a story by Lucian,
and contains largely the same basic plot
elements as The Golden Ass (or
Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, but with
fewer inset tales and a different
ending.[125] Amores is usually dated to
the third or fourth centuries based on
stylistic grounds.[124]
Legacy

Renaissance and Reformation …

The Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli, based

on a description of a painting by the Greek painter
Apelles of Kos found in Lucian's ekphrasis On
Calumny

Lucian's writings were mostly forgotten

during the Middle Ages.[126][127] The
Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine
encyclopedia, concludes that Lucian's
soul is burning in Hell for his negative
remarks about Christians in the Passing
of Peregrinus.[128] Lucian's writings were
rediscovered during the
Renaissance[126][127] and almost
immediately became popular with the
Renaissance humanists.[126][127] By 1400,
there were just as many Latin
translations of the works of Lucian as
there were for the writings of Plato and
Plutarch.[126] By ridiculing plutocracy as
absurd, Lucian helped facilitate one of
Renaissance humanism's most basic
themes.[30] His Dialogues of the Dead
were especially popular and were widely
used for moral instruction.[127] As a result
of this popularity, Lucian's writings had a
profound influence on writers from the
Renaissance and the Early Modern
period.[129][130][127]

Many early modern European writers

adopted Lucian's lighthearted tone, his
technique of relating a fantastic voyage
through a familiar dialogue, and his trick
of constructing proper names with
deliberately humorous etymological
meanings.[30] During the Protestant
Reformation, Lucian provided literary
precedent for writers making fun of
Catholic clergy.[30] Desiderius Erasmus's
Encomium Moriae (1509) displays
Lucianic influences.[30] Perhaps the most
notable example of Lucian's impact was
on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
was on the French writer François
Rabelais, particularly in his set of five
novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel, which
was first published in 1532. Rabelais also
is thought to be responsible for a primary
introduction of Lucian to the French
Renaissance and beyond through his
translations of Lucian's
works.[131][132][133]

Lucian's True Story inspired both Sir

Thomas More's Utopia (1516)[134] and
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
(1726).[135] Sandro Botticelli's paintings
The Calumny of Apelles and Pallas and
the Centaur are both based on
descriptions of paintings found in
Lucian's works.[130] Lucian's prose
narrative Timon the Misanthrope was the
inspiration for William Shakespeare's
tragedy Timon of Athens[134][136] and the
scene from Hamlet with the gravediggers
echoes several scenes from Dialogues of
the Dead.[134] Christopher Marlowe's
famous verse "Was this the face that
launched a thousand ships/And burnt the
topless towers of Ilium?" is a paraphrase
of a quote from Lucian.[137] Francis
Bacon called Lucian a "contemplative
atheist".[30]

Early Modern Period …

Monument commemorating Lucian of Samosata
from Nordkirchen, Germany

Henry Fielding, the author of The History

of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), owned
a complete set of Lucian's writings in
nine volumes.[138] He deliberately
imitated Lucian in his Journey from This
World and into the Next[138] and, in The
Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great
(1743), he describes Lucian as "almost...
like the true father of humour"[138] and
lists him alongside Miguel de Cervantes
and Jonathan Swift as a true master of
satire.[138] In The Convent Garden Journal,
Fielding directly states in regard to
Lucian that he had modeled his style
"upon that very author".[138] Nicolas
Boileau-Despréaux, François Fénelon,
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and
Voltaire all wrote adaptations of Lucian's
Dialogues of the Dead.[139] According to
Turner, Voltaire's Candide (1759) displays
the characteristically Lucianic theme of
"refuting philosophical theory by
reality".[30] Voltaire also wrote The
Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus
and Rabelais in the Elysian Fields,[30] a
dialogue in which he treats Lucian as
"one of his masters in the strategy of
intellectual revolution."[30]

Denis Diderot drew inspiration from the

writings of Lucian in his Socrates Gone
Mad; or, the Dialogues of Diogenes of
Sinope (1770)[139] and his Conversations
in Elysium (1780).[139] Lucian appears as
one of two speakers in Diderot's dialogue
Peregrinus Proteus (1791), which was
based on The Passing of Peregrinus.[139]
Lucian's True Story inspired Cyrano de
Bergerac, whose writings later served as
inspiration for Jules Verne.[134] The
German satirist Christoph Martin Wieland
was the first person to translate the
complete works of Lucian into
German[139] and he spent his entire
career adapting the ideas behind Lucian's
writings for a contemporary German
audience.[139] David Hume admired
Lucian as a "very moral writer"[30] and
quoted him with reverence when
discussing ethics or religion.[30] Hume
read Lucian's Kataplous or Downward
Journey when he was on his
deathbed.[140][30]

Modern Period …

Kataplous, or Downward Journey also

served as the source for Friedrich
Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch
or Overman.[140] Nietzsche's declaration
of a "new and super-human way of
laughing – at the expense of everything
serious!" echoes the exact wording of
Tiresias's final advice to the eponymous
hero of Lucian's dialogue Menippus:
"Laugh a great deal and take nothing
seriously."[139] Professional philosophical
writers since then have generally ignored
Lucian,[30] but Turner comments that
"perhaps his spirit is still alive in those
who, like Bertrand Russell, are prepared
to flavor philosophy with wit."[30]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, many classicists viewed
Lucian's works negatively[128] and read
them with preconceived ideas in mind
about the "Oriental" character.[128] Many
of these ideas were influenced by
contemporary antisemitism, a "reflexive
and genteel" form of which was common
throughout English and German scholarly
writings prior to World War II.[128] The
German classicist Eduard Norden
admitted that he had, as a foolish youth,
wasted time reading the works of
Lucian,[128] but, as an adult, had come to
realize that Lucian was nothing more
than an "Oriental without depth or
character... who has no soul and
degrades the most soulful language."[128]
Rudolf Helm, one of the leading scholars
on Lucian in the early twentieth century,
labelled Lucian as a "thoughtless Syrian"
who "possesses none of the soul of a
tragedian"[128] and compared him to the
Jewish German poet Heinrich Heine, who
was known as the "mockingbird in the
German poetry forest."[128] In his 1906
publication Lukian und Menipp, Helm
argued that Lucian's claims of generic
originality, especially his claim of having
invented the comic dialogue, were
actually lies intended to cover up his
almost complete dependence on
Menippus, whom he asserted was the
true inventor of the genre.[141] Lucian's
Syrian identity received renewed
attention in the early twenty-first century
as Lucian became seen as what Richter
calls "a sort of Second Sophistic answer
to early twenty-first-century questions
about cultural and ethnic hybridity."[128]
Richter states that Postcolonial critics
have come to embrace Lucian as "an
early imperial paradigm of the 'ethno-
cultural hybrid.'"[128]

Editions
The Works of Lucian of Samosata.
Complete with exceptions specified in
the preface . I. Translated by Fowler, H.
W.; Fowler, F. G. Oxford: Clarendon
Press. 1905.; volume II ; volume III ;
volume IV .
Lucian with an English translation
(Loeb Classical Library), in 8 volumes:
vols. 1–5 ed. Austin Morris Harmon
(1913, 1915, 1921, 1925, 1936); vol. 6
ed. K. Kilburn (1959); vol. 7–8 ed.
Matthew Donald Macleod (1961,
1967).
Neil Hopkinson (ed.), Lucian: A
Selection. Cambridge Greek and Latin
Texts (Cambridge/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Lightfoot, Jane (2003). On the Syrian
Goddess . Oxford University Press.
ISBN 978-0-19-925138-4.
Notes
a. /ˈljuːʃən, -siən/; Ancient Greek:
Λουκιανὸς ὁ Σαμοσατεύς, Loukianòs
ho Samosateús; Latin: Lucianus
Samosatensis
b. Tychiades is commonly identified as
an authorial self-insertion,[37][39]
although Daniel Ogden notes that
this can only be true to a limited
extent.[40]

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3. Richter 2017, p. 328.
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Vout, Caroline (22 February 2007), Power
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Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, ISBN 978-0-521-86739-9
 Wallace-Hadril, Andrew (1983), Suetonius:
The Scholar and His Caesars , London:
Duckworth, ISBN 978-0-7156-1747-2

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to:

Lucian

Wikimedia Commons has media

related to Lucian of Samosata.

Works written by or about Lucian of

Samosata at Wikisource
Works written by or about Pseudo-
Lucian at Wikisource
 Greek Wikisource has original text
related to this article: Λουκιανός
Lucian of Samosata Project –
Library/Texts, Articles, Timeline, Maps,
and Themes
A.M. Harmon, Introduction to Lucian of
Samosata
Works by Lucian at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Lucian at Internet
Archive
Works by Lucian at LibriVox (public
domain audiobooks)
Dickinson College Commentaries: True
Histories
Alexander the False Prophet – the
successful travelling prophet of
Asclepius and his oracular serpent god
 Works of Lucian of Samostata at
sacred-texts.com
The Syrian Goddess , at sacred-
texts.com
Macrobii and Lucius (The Ass) , at
attalus.org
Contents – Harvard University Press
P. P. Fuentes González, art. Lucien de
Samosate , DPhA IV, 2005, 131–160.
ISBN 2-271-06386-8
Works of Lucian at the Perseus Digital
Library Project

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