Lucian

Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician, and pamphleteer best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, which he used to frequently ridicule 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, primarily in the Attic Greek dialect popular during the Second Sophistic period.

Life and Background

Everything known about Lucian's life comes from his own writings, which are often difficult to interpret due to his extensive use of sarcasm. According to his oration *The Dream*, he was the son of a lower-middle-class family from Samosata, a city along the Euphrates in the Roman province of Syria. As a young man, he was apprenticed to his uncle to become a sculptor but abandoned the trade after a failed attempt at sculpting. He then fled to pursue an education in Ionia. It is possible he became a traveling lecturer, visiting universities across the Roman Empire. After gaining fame and wealth through his teaching, Lucian settled in Athens for a decade, during which he wrote most of his surviving works. In his fifties, he may have been appointed as a highly paid government official in Egypt, after which he disappears from the historical record.

Literary Works and Themes

Lucian's works were wildly popular in antiquity, and over eighty writings attributed to him have survived, a significantly higher number than for most other classical writers. His most famous work, *A True Story*, is a satirical critique of authors who tell incredible tales and is regarded by some as the earliest known work of science fiction. He also invented the genre of comic dialogue, a parody of traditional Socratic dialogues.

His dialogue *Lover of Lies* mocks belief in the supernatural and contains the oldest known version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Lucian wrote numerous satires mocking 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. Other works, such as *Philosophies for Sale* and *The Carousal, or The Lapiths*, satirize various philosophical schools, while *The Fisherman or the Dead Come to Life* serves as a defense of the mockery he employs.

Lucian frequently 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*. His work *On the Syrian Goddess* satirizes cultural distinctions between Greeks and Syrians and is the primary source of information about the cult of Atargatis.

Influence and Legacy

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*.

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