Lucian, one of the most interesting, graceful, and amusing of Greek writers, was born in Samosata, the principal town of Commagene in Syria, probably about 125 A.D. Intended by his parents to be a sculptor, Lucian early asserted his own decided preference for letters. Having learned Greek and studied under some teacher of rhetoric, he practised as an advocate for a short time in Antioch. He then turned to the composition of show speeches (epideictic oratory) and to reciting them as a means of making a living. His professional career thus made him a travelling artist; and in the quest for suitable festivals at which to deliver his declamations he travelled through Asia
Minor, Greece, Macedonia, Italy, and Gaul. Having thus made a fortune and a name, he settled in Athens, still the intellectual capital of the world, and there devoted himself to the study of philosophy. There, too, he produced a form of literature hitherto, as he claims, unknown. This was humorous dialogue. In his old age he reverted to his first love, recitation. He accepted a good appointment in Egypt, where at an advanced age, eighty or ninety years, he died. A Semite by race but not by education, a subject of Rome but not a Roman, a writer of Greek but not a Greek by birth, Lucian was by circumstances singularly freed from every tie, prepossession, or prejudice which might have stood at all in the way of his deriving the largest possible amount of amusement out of the world. Nor was this all that fortune did for him: she brought him into the world at an age when the old faiths, the old philosophy, the old literature, were all rapidly dissolving in decay, and when what the new would be was an insoluble problem. For satire, whose nature is simply to deny, never was there a fairer field; and Lucian revelled in it. The old faith was gone, and the inherent absurdity of retaining the old deities without the old belief is brought out by Lucian in the Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Dead, Prometheus, Charon, Menippus, Icaromenippus, and others. Whether the old philosophy was the more disgraced by the shallowness or the vices of those who professed it in Lucian's time it would be hard to tell from his Symposium, Halius, Bion Prasis, Drapeta, &c. The old literature had been displaced by novels or romances of adventure of the most fantastic kind, which Lucian parodies in his True Histories. In fine, there is no department of life with which he is unacquainted or from which he fails to raise a laugh. His extensive travels gave him abundant material, and his extensive reading gave him ancient instances to confirm and illustrate his own experiences. His Greek, though not absolutely pure Attic of the best times, is but little removed from it; and this is to be accounted for by the fact that he learned Greek as a foreign language, and consequently picked it up from Plato and not from the streets. Apart from the purity of his Greek, his style is perfectly delightful, simple, pellucid, and sparkling. The editio princeps is dated 1496, Florence. The editions by Hemsterhuis and Reitz (cum versione Latina et notis variorum, 1730-45) and by Lchmann (1822-29, in 9 vols.) have not yet been superseded. See works by Croiset and Sommerbrodt (1888), and Lucian, the Syrian Satirist, by Lieut.-col. Hine (1900).