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In his dialogue The Lover of Lies (Φιλοψευδὴς), Lucian satirizes belief in the supernatural and paranormal [90] through a framing story in which the main narrator, a skeptic named Tychiades, goes to visit an elderly friend named Eukrates. [91]
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal.
Through analysis of key satirical passages in the True Histories, the Charon, the Icaromenippus and the Nigrinus, this chapter demonstrates that Lucian, and his readers, laugh at the history of interpretation, both philosophical and literary.
Lucian: The Syrian Satirist Who Invented Science Fiction. In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks at the work of the master of the comic dialogue, Lucian of Samosata. It all started with a Syrian writer about whom he know virtually nothing.
Beyond formally established religions, though, Lucian’s skepticism and satire extends more broadly to any sort of belief in the supernatural or unseen. A final dialogue we’ll consider, Lover of Lies , tells the story of a skeptic going to a dinner party.
Lucian is himself as much a partaker of this appropriation of Greek past, both in his style and in the subjects of his discourses, as the contemporaries he satirises. Yet it is how Lucian receives and styles this past that is vital for understanding the nature of his satire.
Aug 12, 2024 · There are more immediately recognizable parodies of Herodotus and Thucydides. In the first case it is, as in The Syrian Goddess, the author's naive delight in the supernatural which Lucian picks...
