This is the meagre biography by Suidas of the great satirist who through nearly all of the second century held up the mirror of his frankness to reflect images of the Greek and Roman world. Suidas’ misrepresentation of Lucian’s allusions to the Christians and his fanciful picture of the sophist’s end vilify much of this traditional vita. From Lucian’s own writings more facts may be assembled.
Syrian by birth, he wrote in Greek and became a master of an Attic prose style. As a boy he was apprenticed to a sculptor uncle, but quickly left work with his hands for work with his tongue, studied rhetoric and oratory, practiced as an advocate at Antioch, became a professional sophist and travelled in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Gaul; about A.D. 165 settled at Athens where he lived twenty years, then near the end of his life took an official post in Egypt under the Emperor and wrote an Apology for so doing. Suidas’ description of his writings as “innumerable” seems justified by the eighty-two prose works extant to say nothing of two mock tragedies and fifty-three epigrams, now considered spurious.
Though the great bulk of Lucian’s writings consists of Platonic and satiric dialogues, he enters into the scope of this book as a writer of the satiric or parody romance. For two of his writings, the _True History_ and _Lucius or Ass_, establish for us this new type of Greek romance. His _True History_ is a parody of all travellers’ tales from Odysseus’ to such as those of Antonius Diogenes in _The Wonderful Things beyond Thule_. Probably this work of Lucian had more literary influence than any of his other writings. His other romance, of which we have only an epitome, _Lucius or Ass_, is, I believe, a parody of the romance motivated mainly by religion. Its greatest value in its present syncopated form is that it outlines a contemporary Greek counterpart of the famous Latin novel, Apuleius’ _Metamorphoses_, and furnishes us with a touchstone for testing the pure gold of Apuleius’ originality.
Before, however, we can discuss Lucian’s art of narration in his two romances, we must reconstruct from his own writings his literary autobiography and his conceptions of his literary art. Only then when we have met the critic self-criticized will we be competent to appreciate his brilliant imaginative flights in his novels.