Lucian

Lucian of Samosata was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician, and pamphleteer who lived from c. 125 to after 180 AD. He is known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed philosophers and priests, speculative beliefs about the nature of the universe, religious practices, and superstitions. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek. Everything known about Lucian's life comes from his own writings, which are often difficult to interpret due to his extensive use of sarcasm. According to his oration *The Dream*, he was the son of a lower middle class family from Samosata in Roman Syria. As a young man, he was apprenticed to a sculptor, but after a failed attempt, he ran away to pursue an education in Ionia. He may have been a traveling lecturer and visited universities throughout the Roman Empire. After acquiring fame and wealth through his teaching, Lucian settled in Athens for a decade, during which he wrote most of his extant works. In his fifties, he may have been appointed as a government official in Egypt, after which he disappears from the historical record. Lucian's works were popular in antiquity, with over eighty attributed writings surviving. His most famous work is *A True Story*, a satire regarded by some as the earliest work of science fiction. He invented the comic dialogue genre and wrote numerous satires, dialogues, and treatises making fun of traditional stories, philosophers, and public figures.