of Samosata. Lucian - Lucian, selected dialogues

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SELECTED DIALOGUES

LUCIAN (born about AD 120, died sometime after 180) was the most enduringly enjoyable and influential of ancient comic writers, though Greek was probably his adopted language. He was born at Samosata on the Euphrates, and he seems to have spent his early years as a pleader and travelling lecturer in Asia Minor, and subsequently in Athens and Gaul. Later he gave up his oratorical career and turned to literature, where he established himself as a major satiric writer. Towards the end of his life he had a minor government post in Egypt, but the place and year of his death are unknown. His main originality and his lasting importance in the world of literature were in the development of the comic dialogue as a technique of satire. He achieved this by adapting the long established philosophical dialogue and using it primarily as a vehicle for humour, thus offering inspiring models to numerous subsequent writers in many languages. His favourite targets were false philosophers, sham prophets, and pseudo-historians (How to Write History); but he respects and praises decent, honest men; he enjoys telling stories (The Lovers of Lies); and his most famous piece (A True History) is an extended piece of narrative fantasy an important departure from his favourite dialogue form.

C. D. N. COSTA is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Greek Fictional Letters (Oxford, 2002).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LUCIAN

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
C. D. N. COSTA

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Lucian, of Samosata.

[Dialogi. English. Selections]
Lucian, selected dialogues / translated with an introduction and notes
by Desmond Costa.

p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Lucian, of SamosataTranslations into English. 2. Dialogues, Greek
Translations into English. 3. Satire, GreekTranslations into English.
I. Costa, Charles Desmond Nuttall. II. Title. III. Title: Selected dialogues.
IV. Series: Oxford worlds classics (Oxford University Press)

PA4231.A5C67 2005 887.01dc22 2005023165

Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
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ISBN 0192805932 9780192805935

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 Lucians 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, Lucians 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