Lucian of Samosata

Lucian tells his own early story in Ἐνύπνιον (The Dream): his family in Samosata, a Syrian town on the Euphrates, apprenticed him to his uncle, a sculptor, and on the first day he broke a marble slab and was beaten. That night Sculpture and Education (Παιδεία) appeared to him in a dream and argued for his future; he chose Education. He went west to the Greek cities of Ionia, learned to speak and write the Attic Greek of six centuries earlier so perfectly that his readers forgot he was a «barbarian», and became a travelling orator, performing in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Gaul, where he says he was handsomely paid.

Around the age of forty, by his own account, he tired of rhetoric and invented a new form, the comic dialogue, by crossing the philosophical dialogue of Plato with the mockery of Aristophanes and the Cynic Menippus. He settled in Athens, where most of his best work was written in the 160s and 170s. He travelled too: in 165 he watched the Cynic Peregrinus burn himself alive after the Olympic Games, and in the Black Sea town of Abonoteichus he confronted the oracle-monger Alexander, whose snake-god Glycon he exposed as a puppet.

Late in life he accepted a well-paid post in the Roman administration of Egypt. His last datable reference is to the deification of Marcus Aurelius in 180; the Byzantine encyclopaedia Suda, which detested him as a blasphemer, claims he was torn apart by dogs, a tale no one believes.

About eighty works go under Lucian's name. The Θεῶν Διάλογοι (Dialogues of the Gods) show Olympus as a quarrelsome household, Zeus dodging Hera's questions about his love affairs, and the Νεκρικοὶ Διάλογοι (Dialogues of the Dead) take the reader to Hades, where Diogenes and Menippus laugh at Croesus, Alexander and Hannibal, now all equal skulls, and Hermes shows that Helen's famous beauty was a bare bone.

Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα (A True Story) announces in its preface that everything in it is a lie, and then sails beyond the Pillars of Heracles, is lifted by a whirlwind to the Moon, joins the war between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun over the colonisation of the Morning Star, is swallowed by a whale two hundred miles long with a forest and warring tribes inside, and visits the Isle of the Blessed, where the narrator asks Homer whether he really began the Iliad with the word «wrath». It is the first space voyage in literature.

Φιλοψευδής (The Lover of Lies) gathers grave philosophers telling ghost stories, among them Eucrates' tale of the Egyptian sorcerer Pancrates, whose animated pestle fetched water until the pupil, unable to stop it, chopped it in two and had two water-carriers: the sorcerer's apprentice that reached Goethe and, through Dukas, Disney's Fantasia. Ἀλέξανδρος ἢ Ψευδόμαντις and Περὶ τῆς Περεγρίνου τελευτῆς are investigative pamphlets against two religious impostors of his own day, the latter containing one of the earliest pagan descriptions of the Christians.

Lucian was the favourite Greek author of the Renaissance: Erasmus and Thomas More translated him into Latin together in 1506, More's Utopia is Lucianic in spirit, and from Rabelais and Swift to Voltaire's Micromégas European satire kept returning to his Moon voyage and his talking dead. A lunar crater carries his name. In Greece he is read in the original in the Ancient Greek classes of the gymnasium, where adapted passages from the Dialogues and The Dream are set because his Attic is so clear, and the adjective λουκιάνειος (Lucianic) describes any irreverent satire. For an advanced learner he is the ideal bridge between ancient and modern: his jokes still land, his sentences are short, and Modern Greek translations of A True Story and the Dialogues of the Dead are easy to find. The site's C2 reading on the myth of Hero and Leander belongs to the same late-antique world of learned play.

• A True Story is the first known voyage to the Moon in literature, written some 1,800 years before the Apollo landings; a lunar crater is named Lucian in its honour.
• The sorcerer's apprentice of Goethe and Disney's Fantasia comes from his Lover of Lies, where the enchanted broom is still a pestle.
• Greek was his second language: he grew up speaking Aramaic in Syria and called himself a barbarian by birth.
• Erasmus and Thomas More competed in translating his dialogues into Latin, and More's Utopia borrows his habit of telling an obvious lie with a straight face.