Lucian of Samosata

Lucian of Samosata was a second-century Greek-speaking satirist, rhetorician and essayist from Roman Syria. Born at Samosata on the Euphrates, he made his career in the cosmopolitan literary culture of the Roman Empire, travelling and performing as a public speaker before turning increasingly to prose dialogue and satire. His works parody philosophers, religious charlatans, literary fashions and the pretensions of the educated elite, often combining polished Attic Greek with a deliberately irreverent perspective on authority and belief.

Among Lucian’s best-known works are the Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Dead and A True Story, a fantastic voyage to the moon and other impossible realms that openly mocks travellers’ tales and historiographical exaggeration. He also wrote On How to Write History, which criticises flattery and demands clarity and truthfulness from historians. Because Lucian adopts different voices and comic personae, his own beliefs are difficult to reconstruct. His sceptical humour and experiments with prose fiction influenced Renaissance satire and later traditions of fantastic literature.