Rhetorician, born in Samosata, Syria. He practised as an advocate in Antioch, travelling widely in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Gaul. He then settled in Athens, where he devoted himself to philosophy, and produced a new form of literature - humorous dialogue. His satires include Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead. His ironic True History describes a journey to the Moon, and inspired a number of imaginary voyages. In his later years, he spent some time attached to the court in Alexandria.
Lucian of Samosata (Greek: Λουκιανὸς Σαμοσατεύς, Latin: Lucianus; 120 - after 180) was a Roman rhetorician and satirist, writing in the Greek language, noted for his witty and scoffing nature.
He was born in Samosata (now inundated in a reservoir of eastern Turkey), in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria. Lucian almost certainly did not write all the more than eighty works attributed to him— declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be surprising and provocative. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, patently not "true" at all, with its trip to the moon), and Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead.
Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation where one pleads in court, composing pleas for others, and teaching the art of pleading, but Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot, somewhat as a rhapsode had done in declaiming poetry at an earlier period. In this way Lucian travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, and won much wealth and fame.
Lucian admired the works of Epicurus, for he breaks off a witty satire against Alexander the false prophet, who burned a book of Epicurus, to exclaim
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But he was also one of the first novelists in occidental civilization. In A True Story, a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodied some weird tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and some feeble fantasies that were popular in his time. He could actually be called the Father of science fiction. Lucian also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus, in which the lead character, Peregrinus, takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. The Amores transmitted among the works of Lucian is probably not a genuine work, ascribed by some to Lucian himself, and by others to pseudo-Lucian. ReferenceLucian, Works, Loeb Classical library, 9 volumes ^ Harmon, A. "Lucian of Samosata: Introduction and Manuscripts." in Lucian, Works. |
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