Lucian

Amusingly this story begins with an introduction by the author describing his tale as a lie, or untruth, explaining he was influenced by Homer's Ulysses (founder of all foolery), and how he perceived this book to be an exercise, (intermission), a relaxation from serious studies, so that he may be more apt to endure continued (serious) studies. The story is indeed like Homer's stories; men setting off on a journey, but this time they end up in space, discovering strange worlds, with wine show more rivers, seductive women, milk seas, demigods, barbarians, and a giant whale. The sailors meet with Socrates, Achilles, and Epicurus, and others (but not Plato, as he dwelled in a city framed by himself (i.e. Utopia). Fun story. Early Sci-Fi. show less

In “True History,” Lucian warns his readers that he “shall be a more honest liar than [his] predecessors” by telling the reader frankly that he has “no intention whatever of telling the truth” (pg. 4). The story begins with adventurers sailing west into the Atlantic Ocean, only to be blown to the Moon in a storm. There, they reside with Endymion who currently wars with Phaethon on the Sun as both parties seek to colonize Lucifer, the Morning Star, using bridges made from show more spiders’ webs. The two armies employ hybrid creatures, with the description of these bizarre animals taking up much of Lucian’s description. After the war’s conclusion, Lucian’s party returns to the Earth, where they travel to several outlandish islands, including one made of cheese. On a separate island, Lucian and his group meet various famous Greeks, like Epicurus, “the life and soul of the party” (pg. 42), Aesop, “much in demand for his talents as a raconteur” (pg. 42), and others, though the Sceptics were not present as they couldn’t decide if the island was real and Plato had gone to live in his Republic. On another island, “those who had written Untrue Histories,” such as Ctesias of Cnidos and Herodotus, find themselves in eternal torment (pg. 50). The story, in its greatest lie, ends with Lucian’s unfulfilled promise to tell his readers what happened to the party on a continent on the other side of the world.

In “Lucius or The Ass,” commonly ascribed to Lucian, the main character, Lucias, finds himself transformed into an ass through an accident while seeking to witness magic firsthand. The story closely follows Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, though in the end he transforms himself back into a human by eating a bouquet of roses at the circus. The punchline comes when he returns to the woman he fell in love with during his experimentation with magic, only to find his advances rebuffed as she was more impressed with his endowment as a donkey.

In his translation, Paul Turner worked to maintain the humor of Lucian, updating puns as necessary so that the effect would not be lost on contemporary readers. This Indiana University Press edition also includes gorgeous illustrations from Hellmuth Weissenborn. show less

I read this in bits and pieces for a second-year Greek course. Fortunately, the structure is fairly episodic, so it lends itself well to being chopped up.

Lucian is a fun writer. He wrote around the second century A.D. and most of his works are satires of earlier classic literature. The "Dialogues of the Gods" and "Dialogues of the Dead", for example, poke fun at gods and philosophers. "A True History" is, at least in part, a parody of the Odyssey. It was itself probably an inspiration for show more the genre of traveler's tale literature perpetuated by Swift and others.

Lucian's style is lighthearted but straightforward, and there's an artlessness with which he makes his outrageous assertions which is refreshing. There is a giant whale several miles in length, strange places and peoples such as an island made of cheese and people who run on the water with feet of cork. And everywhere he seems to go someone is in the middle of a war with someone else. His writing is full of jokes and wordplay, and along with the marvellous things he encounters there is also a certain amount of crudity and bizarre sexual fantasies. The moon-people, for example, who have no women among them and so give birth from the calf and have otherwise very unusual anatomies. (This particular episode also offers a telling example of changes in academic culture over the last century and a half -- the original 1880 commentary reprinted here originally omitted the section due to its content; the modern editor, having no such scruples, included it in the back.) There are a few places where one wonders how Lucian possibly came up with the idea, as with the description of a race who have pouches remarkably similar to kangaroos.

Although Lucian is post-classical, his language is modelled on Attic Greek style and is overall reasonably straightforward (the sentences are not ridiculously long or complex). This edition includes notes and grammatical help aimed at the inexperienced reader of Greek.

Incidentally, Lucian was the inspiration for Andrew Wilson, who did the ancient Greek translation of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." show less

Absurd travelogue in the vain of the Odyssey, voyages of sindbad, or the later reports of Mandeville and Raleigh but with the honesty to admit it's all nonsense. Some familiarity with the Odyssey might be of benefit, theres clearly some satire going on but a lot of it is hard to be sure of after so many centuries.
Still this is a pretty fun short read, things like this can be a bit too random and surreal for my taste but this moved along quick enough from incident to incident to keep my show more interest.
The illustrations by aubrey beardsley and others in the version i read, added a certain weird charm of their own to the proceedings. show less