Lucian

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucian of Samosata once described himself sailing past the Pillars of Heracles, only to be swept up by a whirlwind and dropped onto the Moon. There he found two kings at war over the colonization of the Morning Star. He told this story in a work he called A True Story, and he opened it by promising the reader that everything in it was a complete and utter lie. This was a man who lived around 125 to sometime after 180, a satirist and rhetorician born on the far eastern edge of the Roman Empire. He wrote entirely in ancient Greek, though his native tongue was probably Syriac. He ridiculed philosophers, priests, oracles, and the gods themselves. So how does a sculptor's failed apprentice from a remote province become a writer who would later shape Thomas More, Shakespeare, and Jonathan Swift? And why, when so little can be verified, does almost everything we think we know about him come from his own joking pen?

• 2. A Life Built On Sarcasm

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  Lucian is not mentioned in any contemporary text or inscription written by anyone else. He does not appear in Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists, which catalogued the orators of his era. Everything known about him comes exclusively from his own writings, and those writings are soaked in sarcasm. The British classicist Donald Russell put the problem bluntly. He warned that a good deal of what Lucian says about himself is no more to be trusted than the voyage to the Moon, and that it is foolish to treat such material as autobiography. Characters with names suspiciously close to the author's own keep surfacing in his work. Figures called Lukinos, Lukianos, Lucius, and simply The Syrian appear throughout the dialogues. Scholars have long read these as masks, alter-egos, or mouthpieces. Daniel S. Richter pushes back against that habit. He argues these Lucian-like figures are not self-portraits but fictional characters Lucian uses to think with. They let him satirize the conventional line drawn between Greeks and Syrians, and they deflect any accusation that a Syrian author had outraged the purity of Greek idiom by inventing the comic dialogue.

• 3. From Samosata To Athens

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  Samosata sat on the banks of the Euphrates, in territory that had been the capital of the kingdom of Commagene until 72 AD. In that year Vespasian annexed it, folding it into the Roman province of Syria. Its population was mostly Syrian, a fact that would shadow Lucian's reputation for centuries. The world he grew up in was one where traditional Greco-Roman religion had faded into ceremony. People filled the gap with mystery cults: the Mysteries of Isis, Mithraism, the cult of Cybele, the Eleusinian Mysteries. Educated people instead followed one of the Hellenistic philosophies, chiefly Stoicism, Platonism, Peripateticism, Pyrrhonism, and Epicureanism. Every major town ran its own university, and these schools hired travelling lecturers who could command high fees. According to his oration The Dream, Lucian's parents were lower middle class and his uncles owned a statue-making shop. The classical scholar Lionel Casson suggests Lucian delivered The Dream as an address back in Samosata, at the age of thirty-five or forty, after he had made his name as an orator. The story it tells is vivid. Apprenticed to sculpt, Lucian ruined the statue he was working on, his uncle beat him, and he ran off. Then he dreamed of being fought over by the personifications of Statuary and Culture, and chose Culture. Russell dismisses the whole thing as fiction, noting that Socrates too began as a sculptor and that Ovid's vision of Elegy and Tragedy looks all too similar. After establishing himself as a wealthy celebrity, Lucian returned to Ionia around 160, and he is recorded in Antioch in either 162 or 163.

• 4. The First Voyage To The Moon

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  A True Story, in Greek Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα, is a prose fiction that parodies the fantastic tales of Homer's Odyssey and the more sober history of Thucydides. It is often regarded as the earliest known work of science fiction, anticipating voyages to the Moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life, interplanetary warfare, and artificial life nearly two thousand years before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The adventure piles wonder on wonder. Lucian and his companions reach an island with a river of wine full of fish and bears, and trees shaped like women. A whirlwind carries them to the Moon, into a war between its king and the king of the Sun over the Morning Star, fought by bizarre hybrid creatures. The armies of the Sun win by clouding over the Moon and blocking the Sun's light, and then the two sides make peace. Back on Earth, a two-hundred-mile-long whale swallows the travelers, who find fish people in its belly and defeat them. They pass a sea of milk, an island of cheese, and the Island of the Blessed, where Lucian meets the heroes of the Trojan War alongside Homer and Pythagoras. The worst sinners they find are the writers of lies and fantasies, among them Herodotus and Ctesias. The book ends abruptly, with Lucian promising sequels, a vow that one disappointed scholiast called the biggest lie of all.

• 5. The Invention Of The Comic Dialogue

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  In Double Indictment, Lucian declares that his proudest literary achievement was inventing the satirical dialogue. He modeled it on the Platonic dialogue but made it comedic rather than philosophical. The prolaliai to his Dialogues of the Courtesans even suggest he performed these pieces himself, acting them out as part of a comedic routine. Dialogues of the Dead, in Greek Νεκρικοὶ Διάλογοι, turns the Underworld into a stage for justice. It centers on the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and his pupil Menippus, who lived modestly and now rest comfortably in grim conditions, while those who lived in luxury suffer. The work draws on the nekyia in Book XI of the Odyssey, but where Homer punished transgressors against the gods, Lucian added the cruel and the greedy to the roster of the damned. The Lover of Lies, or Φιλοψευδὴς, takes aim at belief in the supernatural. Its skeptic narrator Tychiades visits an ailing friend named Eukrates, whose guests try to cure him with folk remedies and then with ever more ridiculous tales. One of the last is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which the German playwright Goethe would later adapt into a famous ballad. Lucian spared no school of thought. In Philosophies for Sale, Zeus runs a slave market and auctions off Pythagoras, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates, Chrysippus, and Pyrrho, each pitching his philosophy to buyers. He parodied Plato's Symposium with his own Symposium, in which the philosophers get drunk, tell smutty tales, and brawl. He even wrote of Menippus building wings like Icarus and flying to Heaven, where Zeus announces a plan to destroy all philosophers but grants them a reprieve until spring.

• 6. Mocking The Gods And The Fraud

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  Dialogues of the Gods, in Greek Θεῶν Διάλογοι, strings together short vignettes that drag Greek mythology down to human size. The gods come off as comically weak and ruled by their emotions, with Zeus painted as a feckless ruler and a serial adulterer. Lucian returned to this vein again in Zeus Catechized, Zeus Rants, and The Parliament of the Gods. Across his work he kept circling back to Hermes, the messenger who travels between worlds as an intermediary. Some of his sharpest writing targeted real people. Alexander the False Prophet describes the rise of Alexander of Abonoteichus, a charlatan who claimed to be the prophet of the serpent-god Glycon. Though satirical, the account reads as largely accurate, and archaeological finds of coins, statues, and inscriptions have confirmed much of it. Lucian recounts his own meeting with Alexander. Invited to kiss the prophet's hand, Lucian bit it instead. He reports that the only others bold enough to challenge Alexander were the Epicureans, whom he praised as heroes, and the Christians. The Dialogues of the Courtesans stands apart for another reason. It is one of the only surviving works of Greek literature to mention female homosexuality, and it mixes Lucian's own recurring characters with stock figures borrowed from the plays of Menander.

• 7. The Syrian Goddess And The Skeptic

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  On the Syrian Goddess is a detailed account of the cult of Atargatis at Hierapolis, now Manbij, and it is the main source we have for that cult. Lucian wrote it in a faux-Ionic Greek that imitates the ethnographic method of Herodotus, the very historian he derided elsewhere as faulty. For generations scholars doubted the work was really his, because it seemed too reverent. More recently they have recognized it as satirical and restored it to Lucian. Within it he mocks the arbitrary line between Greeks and Assyrians, showing how Syrians adopted Greek customs and effectively became Greeks. The narrator first seems a Greek Sophist, then reveals himself as a native Syrian. Outside evidence backs up the small details. Coins minted in the late fourth century BC, Seleucid municipal decrees, and a late Hellenistic relief confirm that the city was once called Manbog and tied to the cults of Atargatis and Hadad. Lucian's own beliefs resist easy labels. In The Fisherman he casts himself as a champion of philosophy, attacking not the discipline but the greedy, hypocritical pseudo-philosophers who pretend to it. Edwyn Bevan identifies him as a Skeptic. In Hermotimus, Lucian rejects all philosophical systems as contradictory and concludes that life is too short to find which is truest, so one should rely on common sense. The maxim that eyes are better witnesses than ears echoes again and again through his dialogues. Everett Ferguson notes the strong pull of the Cynics on him, above all Menippus, the third-century BC philosopher and satirist to whom he was deeply indebted.

• 8. A Reputation That Refused To Die

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  Francis Bacon called Lucian a contemplative atheist. That label captures how strangely Lucian's afterlife unfolded. He was barely mentioned between his death and the ninth century, even by pagan writers, with Lactantius the first to name him. By the tenth century, some circles knew him as an anti-Christian writer, and the author of the Suda concluded that his soul was burning in Hell for his remarks about Christians in the Passing of Peregrinus. That letter recorded the death of the Cynic Peregrinus Proteus, who burned himself alive on a pyre at the Olympic Games of AD 165, and it preserves one of the earliest pagan evaluations of Christianity. Yet the Byzantines received him warmly, the only ancient author openly hostile to Christianity to be embraced this way. As the saying went, Lucian the atheist gave way to Lucian the master of style, and from the eleventh century he entered the school curriculum. When the West rediscovered him around 1400, the Renaissance humanists seized on him at once. By that year there were as many Latin translations of Lucian as of Plato and Plutarch. His Dialogues of the Dead became favorites for moral instruction. His True Story fed both Thomas More's Utopia of 1516 and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels of 1726. The scene in Hamlet with the gravediggers echoes Dialogues of the Dead, and Christopher Marlowe's line about the face that launched a thousand ships paraphrases a Lucianic exchange between Hermes and Menippus over the skull of Helen. Not everyone admired him. The German classicist Eduard Norden dismissed him as an Oriental without depth who degrades the most soulful language. In the twenty-first century, that very Syrian identity drew fresh attention, with postcolonial critics embracing Lucian, in Richter's words, as an early imperial paradigm of the ethno-cultural hybrid.