Contributor

Lucian

(125 - c. 180)

The satirist Lucian was born in Syria and wrote in Greek. His voluminous works, among them Dialogues of the Gods and The Lover of Lies, mocked impostors, beliefs about the gods, and hypocritical philosophers. William Shakespeare drew inspiration from one of his plays for Timon of Athens, and Ben Jonson took the idea that Helen of Troy “launched a thousand ships” from his Dialogues of the Dead.

All Writing

Voices In Time

c. 100 | Athens

Blowin’ in the Wind

Mastering the flute, for fame and glory.More

Miscellany

Lucian claims in his True History to have traveled to the moon. There, he writes, he encountered a tribe of Treemen whose reproductive method was to cut off and plant a man’s right testicle, let it grow into “an enormous tree of flesh, like a phallus,” then harvest and carve men from its large acorns. Wealthy Treemen were given genitals of ivory; the poor got wood.