Lucian

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

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.

Legacy

Byzantine

Lucian is mentioned only sporadically between his death and the ninth century, even among pagan authors. The first author to mention him is Lactantius. He is made a character in the sixth-century letters of Aristaenetus. In the same century, portions of his On Slander were translated into Syriac as part of a monastic compendium. He was reassessed positively in the ninth century by the first generation of Byzantine humanists, such as Leo the Mathematician, Basil of Adada and Photios. In his Bibliotheca, Photios notes that Lucian "ridicules pagan things in almost all his texts", is never serious and never reveals his own opinion.

In the tenth century, Lucian was known in some circles as an anti-Christian writer, as seen in the works of Arethas of Caesarea and the Suda encyclopedia. The author of the Suda concludes that Lucian's soul is burning in Hell for his negative remarks about Christians in the Passing of Peregrinus. In general, however, the Byzantine reception of Lucian was positive. He was perhaps the only ancient author openly hostile to Christianity to be received positively by the Byzantines. He was regarded as not merely a pagan, but an atheist. Even so, "Lucian the atheist gave way to Lucian the master of style." From the eleventh century, he was a part of the school curriculum.

There was a "Lucianic revival" in the twelfth century. The preeminent Lucianic author of this period, who imitated Lucian's style in his own works, was Theodore Prodromos. In the Norman–Arab–Byzantine culture of twelfth-century Sicily, Lucian influenced the Greek authors Philagathus of Cerami and Eugenius of Palermo.

Renaissance and Reformation

In the West, Lucian's writings were mostly forgotten during the Middle Ages. When they were rediscovered in the West around 1400, they immediately became popular with the Renaissance humanists. By 1400, there were just as many Latin translations of the works of Lucian as there were for the writings of Plato and Plutarch. By ridiculing plutocracy as absurd, Lucian helped facilitate one of Renaissance humanism's most basic themes. His Dialogues of the Dead were especially popular and were widely used for moral instruction. As a result of this popularity, Lucian's writings had a profound influence on writers from the Renaissance and the Early Modern period.

Many early modern European writers adopted Lucian's lighthearted tone, his technique of relating a fantastic voyage through a familiar dialogue, and his trick of constructing proper names with deliberately humorous etymological meanings. During the Protestant Reformation, Lucian provided literary precedent for writers making fun of Catholic clergy. Desiderius Erasmus's Encomium Moriae (1509) displays Lucianic influences. Perhaps the most notable example of Lucian's impact in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was on the French writer François Rabelais, particularly in his set of five novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was first published in 1532. Rabelais also is thought to be responsible for a primary introduction of Lucian to the French Renaissance and beyond through his translations of Lucian's works.

Lucian's True Story inspired both Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Sandro Botticelli's paintings The Calumny of Apelles and Pallas and the Centaur are both based on descriptions of paintings found in Lucian's works. Lucian's prose narrative Timon the Misanthrope was the inspiration for William Shakespeare's tragedy Timon of Athens and the scene from Hamlet with the gravediggers echoes several scenes from Dialogues of the Dead. Christopher Marlowe's famous verse "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" is a paraphrase of Lucian:

ΕΡΜΗΣ: Τουτὶ τὸ κρανίον ἡ Ἑλένη ἐστίν.

ΜΕΝΙΠΠΟΣ: Εἶτα διὰ τοῦτο αἱ χίλιαι νῆες ἐπληρώθησαν ἐξ ἁπάσης τῆς Ἑλλάδος καὶ τοσοῦτοι ἔπεσον Ἕλληνές τε καὶ βάρβαροι καὶ τοσαῦται πόλεις ἀνάστατοι γεγόνασιν;

Hermes: This skull is Helen.

Menippos: And for this a thousand ships carried warriors from every part of Greece, Greeks and barbarians were slain, and cities made desolate?

— Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, XVIII

Francis Bacon called Lucian a "contemplative atheist".

Early modern period

Henry Fielding, the author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), owned a complete set of Lucian's writings in nine volumes. He deliberately imitated Lucian in his Journey from This World and into the Next and, in The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743), he describes Lucian as "almost ... like the true father of humour" and lists him alongside Miguel de Cervantes and Jonathan Swift as a true master of satire. In The Convent Garden Journal, Fielding directly states in regard to Lucian that he had modeled his style "upon that very author". Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, François Fénelon, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Voltaire all wrote adaptations of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. According to Turner, Voltaire's Candide (1759) displays the characteristically Lucianic theme of "refuting philosophical theory by reality". Voltaire also wrote The Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus and Rabelais in the Elysian Fields, a dialogue in which he treats Lucian as "one of his masters in the strategy of intellectual revolution".

Denis Diderot drew inspiration from the writings of Lucian in his Socrates Gone Mad; or, the Dialogues of Diogenes of Sinope (1770) and his Conversations in Elysium (1780). Lucian appears as one of two speakers in Diderot's dialogue Peregrinus Proteus (1791), which was based on The Passing of Peregrinus. Lucian's True Story inspired Cyrano de Bergerac, whose writings later served as inspiration for Jules Verne. The German satirist Christoph Martin Wieland was the first person to translate the complete works of Lucian into German and he spent his entire career adapting the ideas behind Lucian's writings for a contemporary German audience. David Hume admired Lucian as a "very moral writer" and quoted him with reverence when discussing ethics or religion. Hume read Lucian's Kataplous or Downward Journey when he was on his deathbed. Herman Melville references Lucian in Chapter 5 of The Confidence-Man, Book 26 of Pierre, and Chapter 13 of Israel Potter.

Modern period

Thomas Carlyle's epithet "Phallus-Worship", which he used to describe the contemporary literature of French writers such as Honoré de Balzac and George Sand, was inspired by his reading of Lucian. Kataplous, or Downward Journey also served as the source for Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch or Overman. Nietzsche declaration of a "new and super-human way of laughing – at the expense of everything serious!" echoes the exact wording of Tiresias's final advice to the eponymous hero of Lucian's dialogue Menippus: "Laugh a great deal and take nothing seriously." Professional philosophical writers since then have generally ignored Lucian, but Turner comments that "perhaps his spirit is still alive in those who, like Bertrand Russell, are prepared to flavor philosophy with wit."

Many 19th century and early 20th century classicists viewed Lucian's works negatively. The German classicist Eduard Norden admitted that he had, as a foolish youth, wasted time reading the works of Lucian, but, as an adult, had come to realize that Lucian was nothing more than an "Oriental without depth or character ... who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language". Rudolf Helm, one of the leading scholars on Lucian in the early twentieth century, labelled Lucian as a "thoughtless Syrian" who "possesses none of the soul of a tragedian" and compared him to the poet Heinrich Heine, who was known as the "mockingbird in the German poetry forest". In his 1906 publication Lukian und Menipp ("Lucian and Menippus"), Helm argued that Lucian's claims of generic originality, especially his claim of having invented the comic dialogue, were actually lies intended to cover up his almost complete dependence on Menippus, whom he argued was the true inventor of the genre.

Lucian's Syrian identity received renewed attention in the early twenty-first century as Lucian became seen as what Richter calls "a sort of Second Sophistic answer to early twenty-first-century questions about cultural and ethnic hybridity". Richter states that Postcolonial critics have come to embrace Lucian as "an early imperial paradigm of the 'ethno-cultural hybrid.'"

Editions

• The Works of Lucian From the Greek (4 Vols.). Translated by Francklin, Thomas. London: T[homas] Cadell. 1780–1781. OCLC 642640554 (all editions).

1. Vol. 1. 1780.
1. Via Google Books (NYPL).
2. Via Internet Archive (UCLA).
2. Vol. 2. 1780.
1. Via Google Books (Michigan).
2. Via Internet Archive (UCLA).
3. Vol. 3. 1781.
1. Via Google Books (Michigan).
2. Via Internet Archive (UCLA).
4. Vol. 4. 1781.
1. Via Google Books (Cal Berkeley).
2. Via Google Books (British Library).
3. Via Internet Archive (British Library).

• Lucian of Samosata from the Greek with the Comments and Illustrations of WIELAND and Others. Vol. I. Translated by Tooke, William. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. 1820. Retrieved 22 January 2021 – via Internet Archive.; volume II.
• Lucian's True History, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, William Strang, and J. B. Clark, privately printed in an edition of 251 copies, 1894.

• Lucian (1905). The Works of Lucian of Samosata – Complete With Exceptions Specified in the Preface (4 Vols.). Translated by Fowler, Henry Watson; Fowler, Francis George. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. LCCN 06-1045.

1. Vol. 1 – via HathiTrust (Michigan).
2. Vol. 2 – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto).
3. Vol. 3 – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto).
4. Vol. 4 – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto).

• Harmon, Austin Morris, ed. (1905). Lucian [of Samosata] – With an English Translation by A. M. Harmon of Yale University (8 Vols.). Vol. 6 translated by Kenneth Kilburn (1921–2012); Vols. 7–8 translated by Matthew Donald Macleod (1922–2010). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: William Heinemann. New York: Macmillan. LCCN 13-5615; NCID BA28080203 (8 Vol. series), NCID BA00254115 (parent bibliography); OCLC 7623348 (all editions).

Translation by Austin Morris Harmon (1878–1950) . London: William Heinemann Ltd. New York: Macmillan.
1. Vol. 1. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 14. 1913 – via Google Books (UC Berkeley). ISBN 978-0-6749-9015-9, 0-6749-9015-3 (American ISBN), ISBN 0-4349-9014-0 (British ISBN).
Translation by Austin Morris Harmon (1878–1950). London: William Heinemann Ltd. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
2. Vol. 2. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 54. 1960 [first printed 1915; re-printed 1919, 1929, 1953, 1960] – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto). ISBN 978-0-6749-9474-4, 0-6749-9474-4.
3. Vol. 3. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 130. 1960 [first printed 1921, re-printed 1947, 1960] – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto). ISBN 978-0-6749-9333-4, 0-6749-9333-0.
4. Vol. 4. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 162. 1961 [first printed 1925; re-printed 1953, 1961] – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto). ISBN 978-0-6749-9179-8, 0-6749-9179-6.
5. Vol. 5. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 302. 1962 [first printed 1936; re-printed 1955, 1962] – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto). ISBN 978-0-6749-9144-6, 0-6749-9144-3, ISBN 978-0-4349-9302-4, 0-4349-9302-6 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-6749-9333-4, 0-6749-9333-0 (hardcover).
Translation by Kenneth Kilburn (1921–2012). London: William Heinemann Ltd. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
6. Vol. 6. Series: Loeb Classical Library, No. 430. 1959 – via Internet Archive (Michigan). ISBN 978-0-6749-9060-9, 0-6749-9060-9.
7. Vol. 7. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 431. 1961 – via Internet Archive (University of Toronto). ISBN 978-0-6749-9475-1, 0-6749-9475-2.
Translation by Matthew Donald Macleod (1922–2010). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
8. Vol. 8. Series: Loeb Classical Library No. 432. 2001 [first printed 1967; re-printed 1979, 1993, 2001] – via Internet Archive. ISBN 978-0-6749-9476-8, 0-6749-9476-0, ISBN 0-6749-9476-0; ISBN 0-4349-9432-4.

• Neil Hopkinson (ed.), Lucian: A Selection. Cambridge Greek and Latin Texts (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Lightfoot, Jane (2003). On the Syrian Goddess. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-925138-4.
• Selected Satires Of Lucian (1962) Translated and Edited by Lionel Casson Transaction Publishers Rutgers University ISBN 978-0-202-36192-5