Lucian
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lucian of Samosata was an Assyrian rhetorician, and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.
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, who burned a book of Epicurus, to exclaim
- "What blessings that book creates for its readers and what peace, tranquillity, and freedom it engenders in them, liberating them as it does from terrors and apparitions and portents, from vain hopes and extravagant cravings, developing in them intelligence and truth, and truly purifying their understanding, not with torches and squills and that sort of foolery, but with straight thinking, truthfulness and frankness."
In his Symposium, far from Plato's discourse, the diners get drunk, tell smutty tales and behave badly.
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 anticipated "modern" fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and wars between planets centuries before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. He could actually be called the Father of science fiction.
Lucian is also the presumed author of Macrobii (long-livers) which is devoted to longevity. He gives some mythical examples like that of Nestor (mythology) who lived three centuries or Tiresias the blind seer of Thebes who lived 600 years. Most of the examples are normal lives (80-100 yrs). He tells his readers about the Seres (Chinese) who live 300 years. He also gives some advice concerning food intake and moderation in general.
Lucian also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus , in which the lead character, Proteus, takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. This is one of the earliest surviving pagan perceptions of Christianity. His Philopseudes (Greek for "Lover of lies") is a frame story which includes the original version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".
The Amores and the Ass, transmitted among the works of Lucian, are probably not genuine works and are ascribed by some to Lucian himself, and by others to pseudo-Lucian.
See also
- Lucian's Dialogues of the Heterae'
