LUCIAN was one of the most gifted and entertaining of comic satirists, and he was notably influential on a very diverse range of subsequent writers. Yet few details of his life can be regarded as certain; with the exception of a disputed passage in the Greek doctor Galen, no contemporary writer mentions him, and we have to piece together what we can of his life and activities mainly from a scattering of allusions in his own works. He was born probably around AD 120 and died sometime after 180. His birthplace was Samosata, a town on the Euphrates, in the old kingdom of Commagene, which had been incorporated by the conquering Romans into the province of Syria. That much seems clear.
Both the period of his lifetime and the area in which he busied himself are important in assessing the nature of Lucian’s work. The area which we now call Asia Minor and the Middle East had been, since the conquests of Alexander the Great and under his successors, a Greek-speaking society, at least in its upper classes, and dominated by Greek cultural ideals and traditions. When the imperial Roman sway spread eastwards and absorbed the Greek world of Asia Minor and beyond, there seems to have developed on the whole a mutually tolerant coexistence of Roman political domination and the existing Greek cultural traditions, with respect shown by each side to the qualities and achievements of the other. The local Greek and Greek-influenced elements could not and did not usually question the imperial superiority of their rulers; and the Romans tolerated and respected, as they had always done, the cultural achievements of their Greek subjects. There are innumerable friendly references in Lucian to the emperors of the time, and to local Roman-appointed governors.
Falling within the second century AD, Lucian’s lifetime coincided with a period of crucial importance in the story of later Greek literature. This was a phase, which is usually called the Second Sophistic, in which writers thought it highly desirable to recall and imitate the language and the style of what they regarded as the golden age of Greek literature, the Attic prose which was written in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, taking as models, for instance, Plato in philosophy, Thucydides in history, and Demosthenes in forensic oratory. We have a great deal of surviving works from this later period, and many of the writers were remarkably successful in recapturing the earlier vocabulary and style. Among them Lucian is unsurpassed as an Atticizer, even though Greek was probably an adopted language for him and he originally spoke Aramaic. (A good parallel to this achievement might be the Pole Joseph Conrad, who spoke hardly any English until he was over 20 and became one of the greatest of English novelists.) This harking back to earlier literary ideals was a very basic element in both Greek and Latin literature, and it was part of the almost universal practice of mimesis, or creative imitation of chosen models. This was not slavish plagiaristic copying, but an imaginative reworking of a theme on which the writer set his own individual stamp. It might of course take the form of comic parody, as in Lucian’s own The Syrian Goddess, which is a pastiche of the Herodotean style. But mimesis was commonly more allusively linked with its model, as with his Dialogues of the Courtesans, in which the themes and situations are recognizably derived from those of Greek New Comedy and the mime.
Thus mimesis formed a core element in the educational system at the period of the Second Sophistic and Lucian’s lifetime, and among the most important and influential men who had gone through this educational mill were the sophists. These were professional speakers or ‘rhetors’, who not only worked in the courts as pleaders, but also travelled around giving declamations, or show-piece speeches, on a wide range of historical or fictitious topics. Many of them were also distinguished teachers, they found employment as secretaries to great men, and the more illustrious were asked to serve as ambassadors. It would be hard to exaggerate the prestige and influence of the sophists in the intellectual and literary world of the second century, and it was perhaps inevitable that a man of Lucian’s talents would be attracted to try his hand at professional rhetoric.
What we know of his life and his travels has to be derived mainly from his own works, and this information is often delivered in an oblique and allegorical way; as when in The Dream he tells us that when he was a youth the personified figures of Craft and Culture competed for his allegiance, and he chose Culture; or when in The Double Indictment he faces dual accusations from personified Rhetoric and Dialogue: Rhetoric reproaches him for deserting her, and Dialogue complains that Lucian has devalued him from his serious philosophical role to become a vehicle for comedy. Putting together those bits of evidence it seems reasonable to trust, we have something like the following picture of his career. He would have had the standard education of that time, with its strong rhetorical basis. It is not clear whether he formally took up the career of a professional sophist (he does not actually say this), but he seems to have spent his early years as a pleader and travelling lecturer in Asia Minor, and subsequently in Athens and Gaul. Then at about 40 he abandoned his oratorical career, if not his interest in the techniques of rhetoric, and after experiencing a passing interest in philosophy, turned to literature. Later in his life (the date is disputed) he took a minor government post in Egypt, working in the retinue of the prefect there. He died sometime after 180: Marcus Aurelius, who died in that year, is referred to as dead in Alexander 48.
As we have seen, Greek prose at this period was deeply infused with the techniques and the rhetorical productions of the professional speakers and teachers, the sophists, and Lucian’s works show many examples of the traditional exercises of the orators. One of the most important of these exercises was the ‘practice speech’ (melete), either forensic or deliberative, a declamation on a set historical or fictitious theme: Lucian’s Phalaris is a clear example of this type. Then there was the ‘display speech’ (logos epideiktikos), a term which applied to a wide range of occasional oratory, and in particular speeches of praise and blame: in our selection The Fly is a whimsical specimen of this class. A third form was the ‘introductory speech’ (prolalia), a more informal, usually short, preliminary talk before a public performance. Lucian enjoyed writing these pieces: we have eleven of them, including The Dream in this selection.
These were all traditional categories which Lucian inherited, and his virtuosity made expert use of them, whether as straight exercises or with humorous adaptation. His real originality, and his lasting importance in the history of satiric literature, lies in his development of the comic dialogue. The dialogue had of course long been used by writers of philosophical treatises: Plato was the most famous exponent; and Cicero also favoured this form of dramatic presentation in some of his treatises. But these were serious works, though of course they had plenty of room for humour and light relief. What Lucian did was to transform the function of the philosophical dialogue and make it a vehicle primarily for humour. It clearly had the potential for this, offering scope for vivid characterization, cut-and-thrust comic back-chat, and so on; and Lucian made full use of all this, as well as adapting from Plato the Socratic method of insidious questioning and demolition of an opponent (see Hermotimus and introductory note to it). Lucian is very clear about his achievement here—and his debts. In The Double Indictment he portrays himself as being accused by Dialogue for having wronged and debased him, dragging him down from the serious and elevated philosophical position he used to occupy, taking away his tragic mask and replacing it with the mask of comedy or farce. To make matters worse, says Dialogue, Lucian even imposed on him the old Cynic Menippus, and made a complete buffoon of him. Lucian’s defence is in effect that he has actually done Dialogue a favour by making him more popular, attractive, and approachable; and that by associating him with comedy he has given him a new lease of life (The Double Indictment 33–4). The Menippus mentioned here was a Cynic writer from Gadara (third century BC), who is thought to have originated a serio-comic style of satire in a mixture of prose and verse. There is no doubt about Lucian’s obvious debts to him, but the exact extent of them is not easy to assess because of the loss of Menippus’ works. Lucian’s affinity with Menippus seems to be noted also by implication by the later Greek sophist Eunapius (flourished c. AD 400), when he characterized Lucian as ‘serious in his mockery’ (Lives of the Sophists 454).
So it is generally agreed that Lucian invented a new literary genre, the comic dialogue, and much of his best and funniest work is written in this form. Yet, though many of his pieces are in dialogue form throughout, some include a dialogue element only as part of a more complex layout; and it is a feature of Lucian’s virtuosity that he combines different literary forms within the same work. For example, the Nigrinus has a letter and dialogue as a frame for the central section of Nigrinus’ long harangue; and The Lovers of Lies has a dialogue framework for the main narrative with its long series of stories. And when he chooses Lucian abandons the dialogue form altogether, and gives us straight narrative, as in his most famous work, A True History, or a narrative delivered in the form of a letter (Peregrinus, Alexander). Apart from the four sets of minor dialogues (The Dead, Gods, Sea-Gods, Courtesans), where the characters are clearly mythical, literary, or invented, a large number of Lucian’s speakers are real people, and many others can be assumed to be, even if we cannot identify them.
The link with the Cynic Menippus brings us to the question of Lucian’s own philosophical sympathies. These are not easy to decide, and no dogmatic statement is possible, as there seems to be a good deal of ambivalence in his attitude to the different schools and their representatives. The Platonists and the Pythagoreans are usually treated somewhat dismissively and with good-natured banter. There is little doubt of his antipathy to the Stoics, who are consistently given rough treatment throughout many of the works. The Aristotelians or Peripatetics are referred to less than the other schools, but the attitude to them seems to be cynical and unenthusiastic. His ambivalence is most noticeable regarding Cynicism: he is enthusiastically friendly to the Cynic Demonax, but he makes a stinging attack on another Cynic, Peregrinus. Perhaps the explanation is that Cynicism was a more loose-textured and elastic creed, and that differences between prominent individual Cynics could be critical. He seems most sympathetic to the Epicureans (see particularly the Alexander), though this favour is qualified in places by minor attacks on certain practices of the school. What is clear is that he was committed to no single creed, and that for his satiric purposes it was the pompous or the ridiculous that appeared in any philosophical stance and whatever school, which he seized on and castigated. Philosophical virtue and good deeds are praiseworthy, but make for dull satire.
Just as we cannot safely line Lucian up with any one philosophical creed, so we cannot label him with any distinct social or moral viewpoint. But we can say that along with the aim of showing us his paces as an expert literary artist is the aim, in the dialogues at least, of sharing with his readers a laugh at the expense of silly and pretentious people. He is not trying to mend the world but to extract humour from it. Even when the humour appears to be literary, as in A True History, with its extended parody of the popular vogue for incredible travellers’ tales, his targets are the stupid liars who make them up and do not even have the honesty to admit to their deceptions. There are of course straight portraits of decent men saying wise things, like Nigrinus and Demonax; but they also serve to contrast with other behaviour which is stupid or base. It might be urged that in some works at least, like How to Write History, Lucian offers genuine and sensible advice, and in the case of this treatise that is certainly true; but here too the advice highlights by contrast the howlers and the lunacies perpetrated by the would-be historians he is attacking.
It must be clear by now that Lucian ranged very widely in his writings. Almost eighty works have come down to us under his name which are generally regarded as genuine, as well as a handful usually agreed to be spurious. Some idea has already been given of the spread of his interests, which largely reflect the educational ideals and the rhetorical practices of his time. But he must not be thought to be slavishly following received models, and even when we can point to a traditional structure in which he has cast one of his pieces, we also observe that he allows himself plenty of room for his free-wheeling humour, and his iconoclastic jabs at revered and august figures like, say, Plato or Pythagoras. Lucian was one of the wittiest writers in antiquity, but he was not a profound thinker, he did not have a particularly original mind, and he had no detectable moral or philosophical stance. He wrote for educated and literate readers, who he could assume were sufficiently intelligent and well read to appreciate the subtleties of his humour and to pick up his (sometimes allusive) quotations. As we have seen, earlier Greek literature provided him with a quarry of subject matter for his own exercises in mimesis; but the Graeco-Roman society he lived in also offered him a rich field of targets for his satire: silly or hidebound philosophers, charlatans of all kinds, pseudo-historians. His own presence as a stage-manager in his works varies, from lurking unobtrusively in the background to playing a full part in a dialogue under his usual pseudonym Lycinus (as in Hermotimus).
The selection of fourteen pieces offered here will, I hope, give a representative picture of his literary qualities and the range of his themes. Several of them show his preoccupation with philosophy and philosophers (Nigrinus, Demonax, Peregrinus, Hermotimus); the recurrent motif of a journey (either way) between heaven and earth can be seen in Charon and Icaromenippus, with a variation in A True History; The Dream illustrates the rhetorical prolalia, and is one of the works that give us interesting autobiographical details of the author; the Alexander shows us Lucian going for the jugular in one of his most intensely bitter personal attacks; by contrast, The Lovers of Lies illustrates his fondness for telling stories, and the Dialogues of the Courtesans are a light-hearted look at a familiar aspect of Greek society, and clearly derive from earlier Greek literature.
Something should be said of Lucian’s influence on later literature, which was long-lasting and pervasive, though only a brief survey is possible here.* His extraordinary impact on subsequent writers as distinguished as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More can be seen most obviously in three of his own favourite literary forms, the philosophical dialogue, the fantastic voyage, and the dialogue with the dead. But recognition of his influence and even allusion to his name were long in coming. No contemporary refers to him, though it seems clear that Alciphron (probably contemporary) was influenced by the Dialogues of the Courtesans. The same is true of the much later Aristaenetus (perhaps c. AD 500); otherwise there are only isolated references to him, and it is not until the Byzantine period that we can see evidence of his works being rediscovered, starting with the epigrams of Leon the Philosopher (early tenth century). After this there is plenty of evidence of Lucianic influence, and Byzantine interest in him can be typified by the Philopatris, an anonymous dialogue written around the mid-eleventh century in clear imitation of Lucian, which has survived attached to the corpus of his genuine works.
Moving on from Byzantium, it may be helpful to list the early translations of Lucian in the Renaissance and afterwards, as translations were often the trigger for imitations, especially when knowledge of Greek was limited. The landmarks were: the translation into Latin of selections by Erasmus and Thomas More (1506), and three important vernacular versions, Perrot d’Ablancourt’s French translation (1654); the Dryden Lucian in English (1711)—a version by several hands, with a Life of Lucian by Dryden; and Wieland’s German translation (1788/9). So, from the late seventeenth century reading Lucian became widespread and popular, and among his admirers he never looked back.
Prior to these translations, however, there were humanist scholars and writers who could read their Lucian and write Lucianic pieces of their own, and mention should be made of one of the most important, Alberti (1404–72), the most deeply dyed Lucianist of his age. Soon after Alberti, Lucian appeared in print in 1496, with the consequently greatly increased dissemination of his works, and a few years later appeared the ground-breaking translation of Erasmus and More. Erasmus was the most distinguished scholar of the Renaissance, and his admiration for Lucian must in itself have been a decisive influence on others. He commended Lucian for the clarity and elegance of his Greek, and many of his most important works are deeply imbued with the style and flavour of Lucian. This can be seen particularly in the Colloquies (1522–33), and in his most famous work, the Praise of Folly (published 1511). Thomas More in his Utopia (1516) combined two favourite Lucianic motifs, the satirical dialogue and the fanciful journey. Later on, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) reflects the imaginary voyage, and his knowledge of Lucian is otherwise well attested. This has brought us into the eighteenth century, where Voltaire is a major witness to the Lucianic style. The greatest French satirist of his day openly acknowledges his debt to the greatest Greek one, which can be seen in his dialogues, particularly the one entitled Conversation de Lucien, Erasme et Rabelais dans les Champs Elysées (1765). Finally, we should note Fielding, in whose works many Lucianic motifs are obvious; and a curious, much later homage to Lucian in Walter Pater, who included an extensive translation of the Hermotimus in chapter 24 of Marius the Epicurean (1885).
These are simply a few highlights in the astonishing story of Lucian’s popularity, and his influence on some very great and diverse writers. He would have liked to know that story, and he would have enjoyed the thought of successive Papal Indexes banning his works in 1559 and 1590—and of his surviving them unscathed. Individuals pass away, but the types that Lucian loathed, the charlatan, the conceited, the self-important, the plain stupid, are always with us; and perhaps we can still learn a little from him in dealing with these plagues in human society.