Lucian (Λουκιανός) was born at Samosata on the river Euphrates, in the Roman province of Syria, probably not long before AD 125, and he died some time after 180.1,2 One of his essays calls Samosata “my own birthplace”,3 and in a dialogue his stand-in, asked for his country, answers “I am a Syrian, Philosophy, from the banks of the Euphrates”.4 His first language was probably Syriac, a form of Aramaic, yet everything he left is in Greek, most of it in Attic, the Greek of classical Athens, which was the fashion among writers of his day, the period called the Second Sophistic.2
More than eighty works have come down under his name, far more than for most classical writers.2 The reader has seventy-one of them under Lucian and eight more under “Pseudo-Lucian”, for works that are probably not his.5
His life, as he tells it
Debated among scholars No one else in his lifetime mentions him, so everything we know comes from his own pages, and he was a joker.2 The scholar Donald Russell warned that much of what Lucian says about himself “is no more to be trusted than the voyage to the moon” of his True Story.2
In The Dream he says that when he left school, in his teens, his family could not afford a long education, so he was handed to his mother's brother, a sculptor, to learn the trade. On the first day he struck a slab too hard and broke it, and his uncle took a stick to him, “so that tears were the overture to my apprenticeship”.6 That night he dreamt that two women fought over him, one rough and covered in stone-dust like his uncle, the other fair and dignified; he chose the second, paideia: education and culture.2,6 Scholars doubt the story: Simon Swain called it “a fine but rather apocryphal version of Lucian's education”, and Russell noted that Socrates too was said to have started as a sculptor.2
Debated among scholars In The Double Indictment Rhetoric, as a wife suing her husband, remembers finding a young Syrian wandering in Ionia, «βάρβαρον ἔτι τὴν φωνὴν καὶ μονονουχὶ κάνδυν ἐνδεδυκότα εἰς τὸν Ἀσσύριον τρόπον», “still speaking with a foreign accent and I might almost say wearing a caftan in the Syrian style”. She educated him and travelled with him through Greece and Ionia, then to Italy and “as far as Gaul, where I made him rich”.7 Scholars have long read the Syrian as Lucian himself; Daniel Richter argues that he is a literary device.2
In plain terms he was a travelling speaker, who performed before educated audiences from city to city and won wealth and fame by it.1 One modern reconstruction, Lionel Casson's (1962), has him settling in Athens about 165 and writing most of his famous works there over the next ten years or so.2
At the Olympic Games of 165 the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus burnt himself to death on a pyre.2,8 Lucian was there. They were, he says, “the most splendid Olympics that I have seen, though it was then the fourth time that I had been a spectator”, and he walked out at midnight to the pyre at Harpina, where Peregrinus called on the “Spirits of my mother and my father” and leapt into the flames.9 Lucian also met the prophet Alexander of Abonoteichus, whose oracle of the snake-god Glycon he exposed; when Alexander offered him his hand to kiss, “I clasped it as if to kiss it, and almost crippled it with a right good bite!”10 Coins, statues and inscriptions confirm much of what Lucian says about that cult.2
Late in life he took a salaried post in the Roman government of Egypt. He describes his duties, the court cases, “the recording of all that is done and said”, and his salary, paid by the emperor: “many talents in fact”.2,11 After that he disappears from the record.2
What he wrote
His proudest invention was the comic dialogue: the philosophical conversation of Plato's kind, turned into comedy.2 In The Double Indictment Dialogue himself sues the Syrian for dragging him down from the clouds, mixing him up with comedy and with “Menippus, a prehistoric dog, with a very loud bark”, until he is «οὔτε πεζός εἰμι οὔτε ἐπὶ τῶν μέτρων βέβηκα», “neither prose nor verse”, “like a Centaur”.12 Debated among scholars In 1906 Rudolf Helm argued that the real inventor was that Menippus, a Cynic satirist of the third century BC, and that Lucian's claim was a cover.2
The dialogues mock the gods of myth (Dialogues of the Gods, Zeus Rants), the philosophers (Philosophies for Sale, in which Zeus auctions them off like slaves) and the credulous (The Lover of Lies).2 In the Dialogues of the Dead the Cynic Menippus asks Hermes to show him Helen of Troy among the famous beauties of old, and Hermes points: «τουτὶ τὸ κρανίον ἡ Ἑλένη ἐστίν», “This skull is Helen” (our translation).13 And in Menippus the blind prophet Tiresias whispers the secret of the best life: to get on with the present, «γελῶν τὰ πολλὰ καὶ περὶ μηδὲν ἐσπουδακώς», “laughing a great deal and taking nothing seriously”.14
His best-known book is the True Story.15 It opens with a confession: «κἂν ἓν γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο ἀληθεύσω λέγων ὅτι ψεύδομαι», “for in this one thing at least I will tell the truth, that I am lying” (our translation). He is writing, as Harmon translates, “about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others”.16 A whirlwind lifts his ship into the sky; after seven days and nights in the air the crew land on a bright round country that turns out to be the Moon.15,17 There follow a war between the kings of the Moon and the Sun, a voyage inside a whale and a visit to the Isles of the Blessed, and the book has been described as “the first known text that could be called science fiction”.15 It ends by promising more adventures “in the succeeding books”.18 One of the old commentators whose notes were copied into the margins (a scholiast) wrote: «καὶ τὸ τέλος ψευδέστατον μετὰ τῆς ἀνυποστάτου ἐπαγγελίας», “and the end is the biggest lie of all, with its empty promise” (our translation).19
Reading him
He wrote the old Attic, and a joke about it comes down under his name, though Harmon thought it a much later piece.1 In the Trial in the Court of Vowels the letter Sigma sues the letter Tau, because Attic speakers said ττ where other Greeks said σσ: “He has turned me out of all Thessaly, wanting it called Thettaly”, and «πᾶσαν ἀποκέκλεικέ μοι τὴν θάλασσαν», he has shut me out of the whole sea.20 The dictionary gives θάλασσα, “sea”, with the Attic form θάλαττα.21 In Lexiphanes a pretentious speaker whom people mock as “the Athenian” is told to read the best poets, the orators, Thucydides and Plato, and «μάλιστα δὲ Χάρισι καὶ Σαφηνείᾳ θῦε»: “Above all, sacrifice to the Graces and to Clearness”.22
Why he matters
In ninth-century Byzantium scholars such as Photius read him with pleasure, and from the eleventh century he was a school author.2 Photius found the lost Metamorphoses of one Lucius of Patrae so like him that “one might almost call him another Lucian”.23 Ancient tradition / legend Others hated him for what he wrote about the Christians in The Passing of Peregrinus. The Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia, says “The story goes that he was killed by dogs”, and that he will burn for ever with Satan.2,24
In western Europe he was rediscovered around 1400 and became a favourite of the humanists.2 In 1506 Josse Bade printed at Paris a volume of his works in Latin, translated by Erasmus and Thomas More; More's share included The Lover of Lies.25 In More's lifetime his Lucian translations were reprinted more often than his own Utopia.26 The True Story inspired Utopia (1516) and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Lucian's Timon lies behind Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, and Botticelli's Calumny of Apelles is based on a painting Lucian describes.2
One of his stories is still told everywhere. In The Lover of Lies a man overhears an Egyptian sorcerer's spell and makes a pestle fetch water; it will not stop, so “I took an axe and cut the pestle in two; but each part took a jar and began to carry water”.27 It is the oldest known version of the tale Goethe made into his ballad The Sorcerer's Apprentice in 1797; Paul Dukas turned Goethe's poem into an orchestral piece in 1897, and Walt Disney's Fantasia animated Dukas's piece in 1940, with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice.28