Lucian of Samosata

Trips to the Moon (Dodo Press) Lucian of Samosata

Lucian of Samosata (c125AD-c200AD) was an Assyrian rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He was one of the first novelists in occidental civilization and is noted for his witty and scoffing nature. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. In A True Story, a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodied some fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and some feeble fantasies that were popular in his time. He also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus which 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”. He 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. His best known works are A True Story, Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead.