Lucian Of Samosata
Everything that is known about Lucian's life comes from his own writings, which are often difficult to interpret because of his extensive use of sarcasm. According to his oration The Dream, he was the son of a lower middle class family from the city of Samosata along the banks of the Euphrates in the remote Roman province of Syria. As a young man, he was apprenticed to his uncle to become a sculptor, but, after a failed attempt at sculpting, he ran away to pursue an education in Ionia. He may have become a travelling lecturer and visited universities throughout the Roman Empire. After acquiring fame and wealth through his teaching, Lucian finally settled down in Athens for a decade, during which he wrote most of his extant works. In his fifties, he may have been appointed as a highly paid government official in Egypt, after which point he disappears from the historical record.
Lucian's works were wildly popular in antiquity, and more than eighty writings attributed to him have survived to the present day, a considerably higher quantity than for most other classical writers. His most famous work is A True Story, a tongue-in-cheek satire against authors who tell incredible tales, which is regarded by some as the earliest known work of science fiction. Lucian invented the genre of comic dialogue, a parody of the traditional Socratic dialogue. His dialogue Lover of Lies makes fun of people who believe in the supernatural and contains the oldest known version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Lucian wrote numerous satires making fun of traditional stories about the gods including The Dialogues of the Gods, Icaromenippus, Zeus Rants, Zeus Catechized, and The Parliament of the Gods. His Dialogues of the Dead focuses on the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and Menippus. Philosophies for Sale and The Carousal, or The Lapiths make fun of various philosophical schools, and The Fisherman or the Dead Come to Life is a defense of this mockery.
Lucian often ridiculed public figures, such as the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus in his letter The Passing of Peregrinus and the fraudulent oracle Alexander of Abonoteichus in his treatise Alexander the False Prophet. Lucian's treatise On the Syrian Goddess satirizes cultural distinctions between Greeks and Syrians and is the main source of information about the cult of Atargatis.
Lucian had an enormous, wide-ranging impact on Western literature. Works inspired by his writings include Thomas More's Utopia, the works of François Rabelais, William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Life
Biographical sources
Lucian is not mentioned in any contemporary texts or inscriptions written by others and he is not included in Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists. As a result of this, everything that is known about Lucian comes exclusively from his own writings. A variety of characters with names very similar to Lucian, including "Lukinos", "Lukianos", "Lucius", and "The Syrian" appear throughout Lucian's writings. These have been frequently interpreted by scholars and biographers as "masks", "alter-egos", or "mouthpieces" of the author. Daniel S. Richter criticizes the frequent tendency to interpret such "Lucian-like figures" as self-inserts by the author and argues that they are, in fact, merely fictional characters Lucian uses to "think with" when satirizing conventional distinctions between Greeks and Syrians. He suggests that they are primarily a literary trope used by Lucian to deflect accusations that he as the Syrian author "has somehow outraged the purity of Greek idiom or genre" through his invention of the comic dialogue. British classicist Donald Russell states, "A good deal of what Lucian says about himself is no more to be trusted than the voyage to the moon that he recounts so persuasively in the first person in True Stories" and warns that "it is foolish to treat [the information he gives about himself in his writings] as autobiography."
Background and upbringing
Lucian was born in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates on the far eastern outskirts of the Roman Empire. Samosata had been the capital of the kingdom of Commagene until 72 AD when it was annexed by Vespasian and became part of the Roman province of Syria. The population of the town was mostly Syrian and Lucian's native tongue was probably Syriac, a form of Middle Aramaic.
During the time when Lucian lived, traditional Greco-Roman religion was in decline and its role in society had become largely ceremonial. As a substitute for traditional religion, many people in the Hellenistic world joined mystery cults, such as the Mysteries of Isis, Mithraism, the cult of Cybele, and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Superstition had always been common throughout ancient society, but it was especially prevalent during the second century. Most educated people of Lucian's time adhered to one of the various Hellenistic philosophies, of which the major ones were Stoicism, Platonism, Peripateticism, Pyrrhonism, and Epicureanism. Every major town had its own 'university' and these 'universities' often employed professional travelling lecturers, who were frequently paid high sums of money to lecture about various philosophical teachings. The most prestigious center of learning was the city of Athens in Greece, which had a long intellectual history.
According to Lucian's oration The Dream, which classical scholar Lionel Casson states he probably delivered as an address upon returning to Samosata at the age of thirty-five or forty after establishing his reputation as a great orator, Lucian's parents were lower middle class and his uncles owned a local statue-making shop. Lucian's parents could not afford to give him a higher education, so, after he completed his elementary schooling, Lucian's uncle took him on as an apprentice and began teaching him how to sculpt. Lucian, however, soon proved to be poor at sculpting and ruined the statue he had been working on. His uncle beat him, causing him to run off. Lucian fell asleep and experienced a dream in which he was being fought over by the personifications of Statuary and Culture. He decided to listen to Culture and thus sought out an education.
Although The Dream has long been treated by scholars as a truthful autobiography of Lucian, its historical accuracy is questionable at best. Classicist Simon Swain calls it "a fine but rather apocryphal version of Lucian's education" and Karin Schlapbach calls it "ironical". Richter argues that it is not autobiographical at all, but rather a prolalia (προλᾰλιά), or playful literary work, and a "complicated meditation on a young man's acquisition of paideia" [i.e. education]. Russell dismisses The Dream as entirely fictional, noting, "We recall that Socrates too started as sculptor, and Ovid's vision of Elegy and Tragedy (Amores 3.1) is all too similar to Lucian's."
Education and career
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In Lucian's Double Indictment, the personification of Rhetoric delivers a speech in which she describes the unnamed defendant, who is described as a "Syrian" author of transgressive dialogues, at the time she found him, as a young man wandering in Ionia in Anatolia "with no idea what he ought to do with himself". She describes "the Syrian" at this stage in his career as "still speaking in a barbarous manner and all but wearing a caftan [kandys] in the Assyrian fashion". Rhetoric states that she "took him in hand and ... gave him paideia".
Scholars have long interpreted the "Syrian" in this work as Lucian himself and taken this speech to mean that Lucian ran away to Ionia, where he pursued his education. Richter, however, argues that the "Syrian" is not Lucian himself, but rather a literary device Lucian uses to subvert literary and ethnic norms.
Ionia was the center of rhetorical learning at the time. The most prestigious universities of rhetoric were in Ephesus and Smyrna, but it is unlikely that Lucian could have afforded to pay the tuition at either of these schools. It is not known how Lucian obtained his education, but somehow he managed to acquire an extensive knowledge of rhetoric as well as classical literature and philosophy.
Lucian mentions in his dialogue The Fisherman that he had initially attempted to apply his knowledge of rhetoric and become a lawyer, but that he had become disillusioned by the deceitfulness of the trade and resolved to become a philosopher instead. Lucian travelled across the Empire, lecturing throughout Greece, Italy, and Gaul. In Gaul, Lucian may have held a position as a highly paid government professor.
In around 160, Lucian returned to Ionia as a wealthy celebrity. He visited Samosata and stayed in the east for several years. He is recorded as having been in Antioch in either 162 or 163. In around 165, he bought a house in Athens and invited his parents to come live with him in the city. Lucian must have married at some point during his travels because in one of his writings, he mentions having a son at this point.
Lucian lived in Athens for around a decade, during which time he gave up lecturing and instead devoted his attention to writing. It was during this decade that Lucian composed nearly all his most famous works. Lucian wrote exclusively in Greek, mainly in the Attic Greek popular during the Second Sophistic, but On the Syrian Goddess, which is attributed to Lucian, is written in a highly successful imitation of Herodotus' Ionic Greek, leading some scholars to believe that Lucian may not be the real author.
For unknown reasons, Lucian stopped writing around 175 and began travelling and lecturing again. During the reign of Emperor Commodus (180–192), the aging Lucian may have been appointed to a lucrative government position in Egypt. After this point, he disappears from the historical record entirely, and nothing is known about his death.
Views
Lucian's philosophical views are difficult to categorize due to his persistent use of irony and sarcasm. In The Fisherman, Lucian describes himself as a champion of philosophy and throughout his other writings he characterizes philosophy as a morally constructive discipline, but he is critical of pseudo-philosophers, whom he portrays as greedy, bad-tempered, sexually immoral hypocrites. Lucian was not known to be a member of any of the major philosophical schools. In his Philosophies for Sale, he makes fun of members of every school. Lucian was critical of Stoicism and Platonism, because he regarded them as encouraging superstition. His Nigrinus superficially appears to be a "eulogy of Platonism", but may, in fact, be satirical, or merely an excuse to ridicule Roman society.
Nonetheless, at other times, Lucian writes approvingly of individual philosophies. According to Turner, although Lucian makes fun of Skeptic philosophers, he displays a temperamental inclination towards that philosophy. Edwyn Bevan identifies Lucian as a Skeptic, and in his Hermotimus, Lucian rejects all philosophical systems as contradictory and concludes that life is too short to determine which of them comes nearest to the truth, so the best solution is to rely on common sense, which was what the Pyrrhonian Skeptics advocated. The maxim that "Eyes are better witnesses than ears" is echoed repeatedly throughout several of Lucian's dialogues.
Lucian was skeptical of oracles, though he was by no means the only person of his time to voice such skepticism. Lucian rejected belief in the paranormal, regarding it as superstition. In his dialogue The Lover of Lies, he probably voices some of his own opinions through his character Tychiades, perhaps including the declaration by Tychiades that he does not believe in daemones, phantoms, or ghosts because he has never seen such things. Tychiades, however, still professes belief in the gods' existence:
Dinomachus: 'In other words, you do not believe in the existence of the Gods, since you maintain that cures cannot be wrought by the use of holy names?'
Tychiades: 'Nay, say not so, my dear Dinomachus,' I answered; 'the Gods may exist, and these things may yet be lies. I respect the Gods: I see the cures performed by them, I see their beneficence at work in restoring the sick through the medium of the medical faculty and their drugs. Asclepius, and his sons after him, compounded soothing medicines and healed the sick, – without the lion's-skin-and-field-mouse process.'
According to Everett Ferguson, Lucian was strongly influenced by the Cynics. The Dream or the Cock, Timon the Misanthrope, Charon or Inspectors, and The Downward Journey or the Tyrant all display Cynic themes. Lucian was particularly indebted to Menippus, a Cynic philosopher and satirist of the third century BC. Lucian wrote an admiring biography of the philosopher Demonax, who was a philosophical eclectic, but whose ideology most closely resembled Cynicism. Demonax's main divergence from the Cynics was that he did not disapprove of ordinary life. Paul Turner observes that Lucian's Cynicus reads as a straightforward defense of Cynicism, but also remarks that Lucian savagely ridicules the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus in his Passing of Peregrinus.
Lucian also greatly admired Epicurus, whom he describes in Alexander the False Prophet as "truly holy and prophetic". Later, in the same dialogue, he praises a book written by Epicurus:
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 [i. e. sea onions] and that sort of foolery, but with straight thinking, truthfulness and frankness.
Lucian had a generally negative opinion of Herodotus and his historiography, which he viewed as faulty.
Works
Over eighty works attributed to Lucian have survived. These works belong to a diverse variety of styles and genres, and include comic dialogues, rhetorical essays, and prose fiction. Lucian's writings were targeted towards a highly educated, upper-class Greek audience and make almost constant allusions to Greek cultural history, leading the classical scholar R. Bracht Branham to label Lucian's highly sophisticated style "the comedy of tradition". By the time Lucian's writings were rediscovered during the Renaissance, most of the works of literature referenced in them had been lost or forgotten, making it difficult for readers of later periods to understand his works.
A True Story
Lucian was one of the earliest novelists in Western civilization. In A True Story (Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα), a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodies some of the fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and also the not-so-fantastic tales from the historian Thucydides. He anticipated modern science fiction themes including voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life, interplanetary warfare, and artificial life, nearly two millennia before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The novel is often regarded as the earliest known work of science fiction.
The novel begins with an explanation that the story is not at all "true" and that everything in it is, in fact, a complete and utter lie. The narrative begins with Lucian and his fellow travelers journeying out past the Pillars of Heracles. Blown off course by a storm, they come to an island with a river of wine filled with fish and bears, a marker indicating that Heracles and Dionysus have traveled to this point, and trees that look like women. Shortly after leaving the island, they are caught up by a whirlwind and taken to the Moon, where they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun over colonization of the Morning Star. Both armies include bizarre hybrid lifeforms. The armies of the Sun win the war by clouding over the Moon and blocking out the Sun's light. Both parties then come to a peace agreement. Lucian then describes life on the Moon and how it is different from life on Earth.
After returning to Earth, the adventurers are swallowed by a 200-mile-long whale, in whose belly they discover a variety of fish people, whom they wage war against and triumph over. They kill the whale by starting a bonfire and escape by propping its mouth open. Next, they encounter a sea of milk, an island of cheese, and the Island of the Blessed. There, Lucian meets the heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical men and animals, as well as Homer and Pythagoras. They find sinners being punished, the worst of them being the ones who had written books with lies and fantasies, including Herodotus and Ctesias. After leaving the Island of the Blessed, they deliver a letter to Calypso given to them by Odysseus explaining that he wishes he had stayed with her so he could have lived eternally. They then discover a chasm in the Ocean, but eventually sail around it, discover a far-off continent and decide to explore it. The book ends abruptly with Lucian stating that their future adventures will be described in the upcoming sequels, a promise which a disappointed scholiast described as "the biggest lie of all".
Satirical dialogues
In his Double Indictment, Lucian declares that his proudest literary achievement is the invention of the "satirical dialogue", which was modeled on the earlier Platonic dialogue, but was comedic in tone rather than philosophical. The prolaliai to his Dialogues of the Courtesans suggests that Lucian acted out his dialogues himself as part of a comedic routine. Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead (Νεκρικοὶ Διάλογοι) is a satirical work centering around the Cynic philosophers Diogenes and his pupil Menippus, who lived modestly while they were alive and are now living comfortably in the abysmal conditions of the Underworld, while those who had lived lives of luxury are in torment when faced by the same conditions. The dialogue draws on earlier literary precursors, including the nekyia in Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, but also adds new elements not found in them. Homer's nekyia describes transgressors against the gods being punished for their sins, but Lucian embellished this idea by having cruel and greedy persons also be punished.
In his dialogue The Lover of Lies (Φιλοψευδὴς), Lucian satirizes belief in the supernatural and paranormal through a framing story in which the main narrator, a skeptic named Tychiades, goes to visit an elderly friend named Eukrates. At Eukrates's house, he encounters a large group of guests who have recently gathered together due to Eukrates suddenly falling ill. The other guests offer Eukrates a variety of folk remedies to help him recover. When Tychiades objects that such remedies do not work, the others all laugh at him and try to persuade him to believe in the supernatural by telling him stories, which grow increasingly ridiculous as the conversation progresses. One of the last stories they tell is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", which the German playwright Goethe later adapted into a famous ballad.
Lucian frequently made fun of philosophers and no school was spared from his mockery. In the dialogue Philosophies for Sale, Lucian creates an imaginary slave market in which Zeus puts famous philosophers up for sale, including Pythagoras, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates, Chrysippus, and Pyrrho, each of whom attempts to persuade the customers to buy his philosophy. In The Banquet, or Lapiths, Lucian points out the hypocrisies of representatives from all the major philosophical schools. In The Fisherman, or the Dead Come to Life, Lucian defends his other dialogues by comparing the venerable philosophers of ancient times with their unworthy contemporary followers. Lucian was often particularly critical of people who pretended to be philosophers when they really were not and his dialogue The Runaways portrays an imposter Cynic as the antithesis of true philosophy. His Symposium is a parody of Plato's Symposium in which, instead of discussing the nature of love, the philosophers get drunk, tell smutty tales, argue relentlessly over whose school is the best, and eventually break out into a full-scale brawl. In Icaromenippus, the Cynic philosopher Menippus fashions a set of wings for himself in imitation of the mythical Icarus and flies to Heaven, where he receives a guided tour from Zeus himself. The dialogue ends with Zeus announcing his decision to destroy all philosophers, since all they do is bicker, though he agrees to grant them a temporary reprieve until spring. Nektyomanteia is a dialogue written in parallel to Icaromenippus in which, rather than flying to Heaven, Menippus descends to the underworld to consult the prophet Tiresias.
Lucian wrote numerous dialogues making fun of traditional Greek stories about the gods. His Dialogues of the Gods (Θεῶν Διάλογοι) consists of numerous short vignettes parodying a variety of the scenes from Greek mythology. The dialogues portray the gods as comically weak and prone to all the foibles of human emotion. Zeus in particular is shown to be a "feckless ruler" and a serial adulterer. Lucian also wrote several other works in a similar vein, including Zeus Catechized, Zeus Rants, and The Parliament of the Gods. Throughout all his dialogues, Lucian displays a particular fascination with Hermes, the messenger of the gods, who frequently appears as a major character in the role of an intermediary who travels between worlds. The Dialogues of the Courtesans is a collection of short dialogues involving various courtesans. This collection is unique as one of the only surviving works of Greek literature to mention female homosexuality. It is also unusual for mixing Lucian's characters from other dialogues with stock characters from New Comedy; over half of the men mentioned in Dialogues of the Courtesans are also mentioned in Lucian's other dialogues, but almost all of the courtesans themselves are characters borrowed from the plays of Menander and other comedic playwrights.
