Lucian

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Lucian.
Lucian.

Lucian of Samosata (Greek: Λουκιανός ο Σαμοσατεύς, Latin: Lucianus; c. A.D. 125 – after A.D. 180) was an Assyrian rhetorician,[1] and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.

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[edit] Biography

Few details of Lucian's life can be verified with any degree of accuracy. He claimed to have been born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria. In his works, Lucian refers to himself as a "Syrian". [2] "Assyrian" and "barbarian", perhaps indicating "he was from the Semitic and not the imported Greek population" of Samosata.[3] His birthplace was recently lost when the Atatürk Dam project led to the inundation of the site. 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 name added luster to any entertaining and sarcastic essay: over 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, patently not "true" at all, which he admits in his introduction to the story), 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. 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 Alexander of Abonoteichus, 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 fantastic 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 also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus,[4] in which the lead character, Peregrinus 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".

Lucian is also the presumed author of Macrobii (long-livers) which is devoted to longevity. He gives some mythical examples like that of Nestor 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.

The Amores and the Ass, transmitted among the works of Lucian, are usually not considered genuine works of Lucian and are normally cited under the name of Pseudo-Lucian. There is also debate over the authorship of De Dea Syria ("On the Syrian goddess").

[edit] Pseudo-Lucian

"Pseudo-Lucian" is the conventional name given to the unknown authors of a number of pseudepigrapha attributed to Lucian. These spurious works include:

Of these, the most famous are probably the Amores with its praise of pederasty, and the Lucius or The Ass, a shorter and bawdier version of the story made famous by Apuleius.

[edit] References

  • Lucian, Works, Loeb Classical library, 9 volumes
  1. ^ Parpola, Simo (April 2003). Assyrian Identity in Ancient Times and Today (PDF) (English). Assyriologist. Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies. “In the second century AD, two prominent writers from Roman Syria, Lucian and Tatian, ostentatiously identify themselves as Assyrians (Assúrios). This self-identification is commonly misinterpreted to imply nothing more than that these writers were ethnic Syrians (in the modern sense) speaking Aramaic as their mother tongue.”
  2. ^ Harmon, A. M. "Lucian of Samosata: Introduction and Manuscripts." in Lucian, Works. Loeb Classical Library (1913)
  3. ^ Keith Sidwell, introduction to Lucian: Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches (Penguin Classics, 2005) p.xii
  4. ^ Passing of Peregrinus at Tertullian.org

[edit] Further reading

  • Ogden, Daniel, In Search of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. The Traditional Tales of Lucian's Lover of Lies. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007. Pp. ix, 310.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Lucian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lucian of Samosata
SHORT DESCRIPTION Writer: a rhetorician and satirist
DATE OF BIRTH 120 - after 180
PLACE OF BIRTH Samosata
DATE OF DEATH 120 - after 180
PLACE OF DEATH