I wanted to read this book simply because it was written in the second century AD and is said to be the earliest known work of fiction. Curiosity had me wondering what sort of outlandish adventures this book might boast. The author starts out his tall tale admitting that everything he is about to say is a lie. The creative nonsense to follow is in fact wildly unbelievable. To me, it reads like a story created by a middle school classroom of students brainstorming outlandish adventures one common hero might face after setting sail for anywhere imaginable. It was a fun read, yes, but not near as impressive as the Odyssey or the Iliad. ( )

Amusingly this story begins with an introduction by the author describing his tale as a lie, or untruth, explaining he was influenced by Homer's Ulysses (founder of all foolery), and how he perceived this book to be an exercise, (intermission), a relaxation from serious studies, so that he may be more apt to endure continued (serious) studies. The story is indeed like Homer's stories; men setting off on a journey, but this time they end up in space, discovering strange worlds, with wine rivers, seductive women, milk seas, demigods, barbarians, and a giant whale. The sailors meet with Socrates, Achilles, and Epicurus, and others (but not Plato, as he dwelled in a city framed by himself (i.e. Utopia). Fun story. Early Sci-Fi. ( )

Absurd travelogue in the vain of the Odyssey, voyages of sindbad, or the later reports of Mandeville and Raleigh but with the honesty to admit it's all nonsense. Some familiarity with the Odyssey might be of benefit, theres clearly some satire going on but a lot of it is hard to be sure of after so many centuries.
Still this is a pretty fun short read, things like this can be a bit too random and surreal for my taste but this moved along quick enough from incident to incident to keep my interest.
The illustrations by aubrey beardsley and others in the version i read, added a certain weird charm of their own to the proceedings. ( )

I read this in bits and pieces for a second-year Greek course. Fortunately, the structure is fairly episodic, so it lends itself well to being chopped up.

Lucian is a fun writer. He wrote around the second century A.D. and most of his works are satires of earlier classic literature. The "Dialogues of the Gods" and "Dialogues of the Dead", for example, poke fun at gods and philosophers. "A True History" is, at least in part, a parody of the Odyssey. It was itself probably an inspiration for the genre of traveler's tale literature perpetuated by Swift and others.

Lucian's style is lighthearted but straightforward, and there's an artlessness with which he makes his outrageous assertions which is refreshing. There is a giant whale several miles in length, strange places and peoples such as an island made of cheese and people who run on the water with feet of cork. And everywhere he seems to go someone is in the middle of a war with someone else. His writing is full of jokes and wordplay, and along with the marvellous things he encounters there is also a certain amount of crudity and bizarre sexual fantasies. The moon-people, for example, who have no women among them and so give birth from the calf and have otherwise very unusual anatomies. (This particular episode also offers a telling example of changes in academic culture over the last century and a half -- the original 1880 commentary reprinted here originally omitted the section due to its content; the modern editor, having no such scruples, included it in the back.) There are a few places where one wonders how Lucian possibly came up with the idea, as with the description of a race who have pouches remarkably similar to kangaroos.

Although Lucian is post-classical, his language is modelled on Attic Greek style and is overall reasonably straightforward (the sentences are not ridiculously long or complex). This edition includes notes and grammatical help aimed at the inexperienced reader of Greek.

Incidentally, Lucian was the inspiration for Andrew Wilson, who did the ancient Greek translation of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."

4,0 ( )