Lucian, Volume I - Phalaris III. Hippias. Dionysus. Heracles. On Amber. The Fly.

Antiquity's satirist supreme.

Lucian of Samosata on the Euphrates (fl. AD 160-190) ranks among the most dazzlingly creative, virtuosic, and boldly original writers of antiquity. Although he more than once characterizes his writings, many of them intended for public performance, as a combination of dialogue and comedy, in truth the diversity of his extant works is startling, ranging from philosophic and moral dialogue to invective, from mythology to contemporary biography to high fantasy, from mock encomium to Herodotean ethnography, and from generic combinations to unclassifiable novelties, all infused with ebullient wit, elegant humor, and refined satire, and all delivered in sparkling style.

Included in the Loeb edition of Lucian are all of his approximately seventy-five authentic works together with those doubtfully attributed. Among the highlights of Volume I are True Stories, an early science-fiction account of a voyage to the moon, and Symposium, a rollicking dinner conversation among Stoic, Epicurean, Peripatetic, and Cynic philosophers.

This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition by A. M. Harmon (1913), offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

About the author

Peter Thonemann is Professor of Ancient History, Wadham College, University of Oxford.

Product details

• Authors: Lucian
• Assisted by: Peter Thonemann (Editor and translation)
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 12.02.2026
• EAN: 9780674997707
• ISBN: 978-0-674-99770-7
• No. of pages: 400
• Series: Loeb Classical Library
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, FICTION / Satire, LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Myth & legend told as fiction, Satirical fiction and parodies, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval