Lucian

• 1. The Sculptor Who Ran Away

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  Lucian of Samosata was born in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates around 125 AD. This city sat on the far eastern outskirts of the Roman Empire and had been the capital of Commagene until Vespasian annexed it in 72 AD. His native tongue was likely Syriac, a form of Middle Aramaic spoken by the local population. He came from a lower middle class family where his uncles owned a statue-making shop. As a young man, he apprenticed to his uncle to learn the craft of sculpting. The training did not go well for him. He proved poor at the work and ruined the statue he was currently carving. His uncle beat him for this failure. Lucian ran away from home shortly after that beating. He wandered into Ionia with no clear idea of what to do next.

• 2. Inventing the Satirical Dialogue

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  Lucian declared his proudest literary achievement to be the invention of the satirical dialogue genre. He modeled this new form on earlier Platonic dialogues but made them comedic rather than philosophical. His Dialogues of the Dead centers on the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and Menippus who live comfortably in the Underworld while those who lived luxuriously suffer there. The work draws on Homer's nekyia in Book XI of the Odyssey but adds cruel punishment for greedy persons. In Philosophies for Sale, Zeus puts famous thinkers like Pythagoras and Socrates up for sale as if they were slaves. Each philosopher tries to persuade customers to buy their specific school of thought. The Banquet or Lapiths exposes hypocrisies among representatives of all major philosophical schools. A full-scale brawl breaks out when the philosophers argue over whose school is best. These works targeted a highly educated upper-class Greek audience and relied on constant allusions to Greek cultural history.

• 3. A True Story And The Moon War

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  Lucian wrote A True Story as a fictional narrative that parodies fantastic tales told by Homer and Thucydides. The novel begins with Lucian and fellow travelers journeying past the Pillars of Heracles. A storm blows them off course to an island filled with wine rivers and bears. They get caught in a whirlwind and taken to the Moon where they witness a war between the king of the Sun and the king of the Moon. Both armies include bizarre hybrid lifeforms fighting over colonization of the Morning Star. The Sun's army wins by clouding over the Moon and blocking its light. After returning to Earth, the adventurers are swallowed by a 200-mile-long whale. Inside the creature they discover fish people whom they wage war against before killing the beast with a bonfire. They encounter a sea of milk and an island of cheese before meeting heroes from the Trojan War including Homer himself. The book ends abruptly promising future adventures in sequels which never arrived.

• 4. The False Prophet And The Skeptic

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  Alexander of Abonoteichus was a charlatan who claimed to be the prophet of the serpent-god Glycon. Lucian wrote Alexander the False Prophet to describe this rise of fraud. He describes his own meeting with Alexander where he posed as a friendly philosopher. When Alexander invited him to kiss his hand, Lucian bit it instead. Aside from Lucian, only Epicureans and Christians dared challenge Alexander's reputation as a true prophet. In The Lover of Lies, a skeptic named Tychiades visits an elderly friend named Eukrates. Guests at the house offer folk remedies for Eukrates' illness while telling increasingly ridiculous stories about the supernatural. One story is called The Sorcerer's Apprentice which later inspired Goethe. Lucian rejected belief in daemones or phantoms because he had never seen such things. He regarded superstition as foolishness and used irony to expose those who pretended to be philosophers when they were not.

• 5. Byzantine Survival And Renaissance Revival

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  Lucian is mentioned only sporadically between his death and the ninth century among pagan authors. Lactantius was the first author to mention him after that long silence. Portions of On Slander were translated into Syriac in the sixth century as part of a monastic compendium. Photios reassessed him positively in the ninth century noting that Lucian ridicules pagan things in almost all his texts. By 1400 there were just as many Latin translations of Lucian as there were for Plato and Plutarch. His Dialogues of the Dead became widely used for moral instruction during the Renaissance. Desiderius Erasmus published Encomium Moriae in 1509 displaying clear Lucianic influences. François Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel starting in 1532 with primary introduction of Lucian to French humanists. Sandro Botticelli painted The Calumny of Apelles based on descriptions found in Lucian's works. Thomas More published Utopia in 1516 inspired by A True Story while Jonathan Swift released Gulliver's Travels in 1726 following the same pattern.

• 6. Nietzsche And The Modern Laugh

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  Friedrich Nietzsche drew inspiration from Kataplous or Downward Journey for his concept of the Übermensch or Overman. Tiresias tells Menippus to laugh a great deal and take nothing seriously which echoes Nietzsche's declaration of a new way of laughing at everything serious. Henry Fielding owned nine volumes of Lucian's writings and modeled his own style upon that author. Voltaire wrote Candide in 1759 displaying the theme of refuting philosophical theory by reality. He also composed The Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus and Rabelais treating Lucian as one of his masters in intellectual revolution. Denis Diderot drew inspiration from Lucian in Socrates Gone Mad and Conversations in Elysium. David Hume read Kataplous when he was on his deathbed calling Lucian a very moral writer. German classicist Eduard Norden admitted wasting time reading Lucian as a youth before realizing he was an Oriental without depth. Rudolf Helm labeled him a thoughtless Syrian who possessed none of the soul of a tragedian. Postcolonial critics now embrace Lucian as an early imperial paradigm of ethno-cultural hybridity.