Iambulus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Iambulus also has acquainted us with many wonders which he met with in the great sea, and which everybody knew to be absolute falsehoods: the work, however, was not unentertaining." --A True Story by Lucian, Thomas Francklin translation |
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Iambulos was an ancient Greek merchant and the likely author of an Utopian novel about the strange forms and figures of the inhabitants of India.
His work did not survive in the original, but only as a fragment in Diodorus Siculus′ Bibliotheca historica. Diodorus, who seems only to have transcribed lambulus in his description of the Indians, relates that the lambulus was made a slave by the Ethiopians, and sent by them to a happy island in the eastern seas, where he acquired his knowledge. The whole account, however, has the appearance of a mere fiction; and the description which lambulus gave of the east, which he had probably never seen, consisted of nothing but fabulous absurdities.
Iambulus is mentioned in the humorous novel, "True Story" by Lucian as writing "a lot of surprising things about the Atlantic Ocean". He is listed in the preface as an inspiration.
