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Lucian of Samosata (in ancient Syria) was one of the most original and engaging figures of postclassical Greek culture. Like other Greek writers in the Roman Empire, he is difficult to classify generically or ideologically. A Hellenized Syrian, Lucian, according to Douglas J. M. Duncan in Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (1979), "out-Greeked the Greeks, [as] a writer of the Christian era who brought a thousand years of Greek culture to life as though it were contemporary." Lucian was nonetheless not simply a traditionalist. Indeed, in Lexiphanes he parodied the classicizing literary fashions (such as Atticism) that Greeks in the empire practiced, and he treated Greek ethnocentrism and the easy idealization of the classical past as targets ripe for satire, as in, for example, his Anacharsis and Philosophers for Sale! Although long associated with philosophy, Lucian was not himself a philosopher but rather a Sophist, satirist, and parodist who, following Plato, the Cynics (such as Menippus), and Aristophanes and the Old Comic Poets, took philosophers and their discourse as one of his principal subjects.
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